Carrying McCain’s Water Is Heavy Lifting

[babylonsister]

Carrying McCain’s Water Is Heavy Lifting
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.

snip//

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.”

more...

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

[liberalmuse]

1. Okay, a supermarket cheese aisle vs a 200,000 gathering in Berlin.

Which would you want to cover? McCain only has himself to blame. If you have a gun or rope in the house, do NOT watch McCain speak.

on edit: dammit, I can't type today. x(

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. Study shows clearly: Media has been harder on Obama

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

Link to thread
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=6546504&mesg_id=6546504

[babylonsister]

4. I saw that; makes perfect sense to me. And McGrumpy continues to whine. nt

[AndyTiedye]

3. McLame is Demanding Even More Favorable Coverage, and They Will Oblige