Carrying McCain’s Water Is Heavy Lifting

[Joanne98]

by Jamison Foser
John McCain complaining about media coverage is a little like an oil company complaining about profit margins: hard to believe, and even harder to feel much sympathy.

This is, after all, a politician who has referred to the press as his “base,” and a politician about whom MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has said “every last one of them would move to Massachusetts and marry John McCain if they could.” As Eric Alterman and George Zornick recently explained in The Nation, “no candidate since John F. Kennedy, and perhaps none since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has enjoyed such cozy relations with the press.”

But the coziness of that relationship has become increasingly one-sided in recent months, as McCain and his campaign lash out at the media, who then redouble their efforts to please the Arizona senator.

In early May, McCain senior adviser Mark Salter released a memo accusing the media of “form a protective barrier around , declaring serious limits to the questions, discussion and debate in this race,” adding:

Senator Obama has good reason to think this plan will succeed, as serious journalists have written of the need for ‘de-tox’ to cure ’swooning’ over Senator Obama, and others have admitted to losing their objectivity while with him on the campaign trail.

Later that month, McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt claimed MSNBC is “a partisan advocacy organization that exists for the purpose of attacking John McCain.” The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz dutifully typed up Schmidt’s charge without offering a contrary point of view. Nor did Kurtz note that McCain is subject of regular and effusive praise from MSNBC employees such as Chris Matthews, who has a habit of saying that McCain “deserves” to be president and says he “loves” McCain.

In June, Salter announced that seats on the comfy sofa next to McCain’s captain’s chair on his new plane were available only to “the good reporters,” who would “have to earn it.” Kurtz responded, “I think Mark Salter … was joking and we should all lighten up. Can you imagine the uproar if the McCain campaign actually had a policy of rewarding favorable reporters with access to the candidate on the plane and shutting out those who dared to be critical? There would be a media revolt.” But there was no “media revolt” when Salter reportedly threatened to throw Newsweek off the campaign bus just a month earlier, or when an Arizona reporter was kicked off the McCain bus. Rather than leading a “revolt” over such tactics, Kurtz covered them up, asserting it was all a big joke.

This week, the McCain campaign against the media went into overdrive. First, McCain allies began complaining that Obama’s trip abroad was garnering a great deal of media attention. Republican Rep. Eric Cantor, for example, said: “The question really needs to be posed: Is this type of coverage fair? … This is nothing but a political stunt.” McCain spokesperson Jill Hazelbaker complained that “it certainly hasn’t escaped us that the three network newscasts will originate from stops on Obama’s trip.” Today, the Republican National Committee sniffed about Obama’s “overwhelming advantage in attention paid by the media.”

And, as they often do when Republicans complain about the media, the media paid close attention. The Associated Press ran an article headlined, “Is media playing fair in campaign coverage?” The article was built around Republican complaints and contained not a word of criticism that the media has been excessively kind to McCain rather than Obama. The New York Times reported that coverage of Obama’s trip abroad “feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain’s campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates.”

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/26/10635/