Well, we have recently been told that McCain is not whining about the media.

Maybe that is so.  

Maybe it is because he doesn't have to bother, since he has Robert M. "Mike" Duncan, Chairman, Republican National Committee to do it for him.

Not only is "Mike" Duncan whining about the media, he is whining about you: "the Democrats and their leftist allies".  Your "radical groups" connected with "Big Labor" and the "liberal Media".

This is what good-ole Mike thinks of you, as of about three minutes ago when it hit my Inbox:

I don't get it. Over the last couple of days, while Obama has been overseas, the media seems obsessed with any possible Obama gaffes. They make the case that, since he's a presidential hopeful, he should make any mistakes while meeting world leaders.

Excuse me? Let me remind them of President George W. Bush.

That guy has made just about every mistake possible, but the media has never given him the kind of scrutiny they are aiming at Obama. And, don't even get me started on McCain's f*ck-ups!

I'm so glad the media has raised the bar for presidential hopefuls. It's too bad they didn't do it 7-8 years ago.

Cross-posted at Clintonistas for Obama.

After watching Hillary get ripped apart by the media, this should infuriate all of us.  On this weekend's edition of the The McLaughlin Group, John McLaughlin described Barack Obama as an oreo cookie--"a black on the outside, a white on the inside."

(cross-posted at Kickin it with CG and Clintonistas for Obama)

On the July 9 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, while discussing a July 8 speech in which Sen. Barack Obama discussed the importance of learning a second language, G. Gordon Liddy claimed that Obama "wants you to be sure your child can speak fluent illegal alien." He added: "Sadly, with every legal and cultural step we take to make our life more immediately convenient for non-English-speaking illegal aliens, we merely feed the beast."

Liddy later stated: " 'Round here, let's see, I speak some French, some German as well as English. Franklin [Liddy's producer] speaks fluent French, fluent Italian, as well as English. But none of us here, so far as I know, speak illegal alien."  He had previously said of undocumented workers from Mexico: "[T]hey want to speak Spanish, you know, and other varieties of illegal alien."

From the July 9 broadcast of Radio America's The G. Gordon Liddy Show:

LIDDY: And that, of course is the latest pander from Barack Obama. He says that Europeans coming over here can speak German and French. Well, yes, if you're from Germany I would suspect you would speak German. And you -- you would speak French and they do study English because English is the universal language. All aircraft communications and all the rest all over the world are in English. No, they're not in Russian or Chinese, or anything else. But think about that; he wants you to be sure your child can speak fluent illegal alien. Sadly, with every legal and cultural step we take to make our life more immediately convenient for non-English-speaking illegal aliens, we merely feed the beast.

[...]

LIDDY: You've just heard Barack Obama insisting that we all teach our children Spanish. Well, not mine, no way. 'Round here, let's see, I speak some French, some German as well as English. Franklin speaks fluent French, fluent Italian, as well as English. But none of us here, so far as I know, speak illegal alien.

What a Douche.

Click here to hear the clip if you can stomach it.

I have tried to be cynical about the media's motives in regard to covering politics in general and the Presidential campaign in particular but I haven't been cynical enough.  As Max Bergmann  at The Huffington Posts notes: LINK

This is the week that should have effectively ended John McCain's efforts to become the next president of the United States. But you wouldn't know it if you watched any of the mainstream media outlets or followed political reporting in the major newspapers.

During this past week: McCain called the most important entitlement program in the U.S. a disgrace, his top economic adviser called the American people whiners, McCain released an economic plan that no one thought was serious, he flip flopped on Iraq, joked about the deaths of Iranian citizens, and denied making comments that he clearly made -- TWICE. All this and it is not even Friday! Yet watching and reading the mainstream press you would think McCain was having a pretty decent political week, I mean at least Jesse Jackson didn't say anything about him.

(cross-posted at Kickin it with CG and Clintonistas for Obama)

Unlike any other election cycle, the issues of race, gender, age, and class have dominated public and private conversations over the course of this election.

That is why on June 17th, The Women's Media Center, along with The White House Project and The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, brought together top national political observers and media professionals for an in-depth conversation about how the media creates and reflects public perceptions on presidential candidates. Speakers included:
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• Christiane Amanpour, Chief International Correspondent, CNN
  
• Susan Carroll, Senior Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics
  
• Callie Crossley, National Television and Radio Commentator and Program Manager, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
  
• William Douglas, White House Correspondent, McClatchy Washington Bureau
  
• Juan Gonzalez, Columnist, New York Daily News
  
• Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center
  
• Celinda Lake, Political strategist and President of Lake Research Partners
  
• Courtney Martin, Author and Columnist for The American Prospect Online
  
• Pamela Newkirk, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University
  
• Geneva Overholser, Director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California
  
• Ron Walters, Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
  
• Patricia J. Williams, Columnist, The Nation, and Professor of Law, Columbia University

Held June 17 in New York, "From Soundbites to Solutions" started a conversation that one can hope will continue through this election cycle, as the public, press and candidates grapple with tough issues of bias, identity and language.

Further information is available, including video of the conference.

[Republished from 2008Central.net]

TNR's Eve Fairbanks offers a plea for reduced surrogates, writing;

I haven't been around forever, but has ever a campaign felt so plagued by gaffes made by non-candidates?

[...]

Do McCain and Obama really need so many minions and representatives covering every cable show, every hour? Can't we do away with this evil proliferation of surrogates?

Indeed.  The campaigns definitely don't need the amount of surrogates and "sortagates" (my word for the person that seems to be speaking on behalf of the candidate, but turns out not to be) that they currently have.  From the campaign's perspective, murky surrogate-land gives them the advantages of having many surrogates to spread their message with the added advantage of being able to distance themselves or disown that individual should they mess up.  That being said, in many ways, the problem with the proliferation of surrogates isn't their increased presence.  Rather, it's the way that the campaigns and the press are using them.

Using surrogates to speak about the advantages of a particular policy position, to engage in debates and to speak on behalf of the candidate at times is a necessary and useful part of presidential politics.  That said, when a person is speaking as a surrogate, it needs to be made clear that they are in fact speaking on behalf of the campaign (and not just espousing their own views).  On the other hand, contrary to acting as a surrogate, when someone is acting as a "sortagate," the press should not treat them as though they were a surrogate.  Here in lies the problem.  The press, with the assistance of the campaigns, has successfully blurred the line between a campaign surrogate and someone that is just advocating/supporting a candidate.  Accordingly, when interviewing sortagates, the inquires should not focus on official campaign positions or responses, but rather, the inquires should be more in the direction of advocacy for whatever position they want to be advancing.

Now, if the press were to re-establish this line, then they would certainly be squandering the ability to gin up controversies and gaffes surrounding sortagates.  So, from a purely selfish perspective, it is highly unlikely that the cable news shows will go to any effort to clarify this mistake.  Perhaps the campaigns will?  Although surrogate/sortagate proliferation benefits them, it does run with the risk of losing control of the daily message because someone unaffiliated with the campaign may have sneezed, and because that sneeze sort of sounded like a curse word, it dominates news for a day.

My prescription: clarity.  The campaigns will likely need to start the effort, by making campaign spokespeople and official surrogates more available for TV interviews, so that the news folks don't have to rely on sortagates.  This will provide them with increased message control, and, could also increase the quality of discourse (given how utterly uniformed some sortagates are).  If the campaigns continue to allow the line between campaign spokespeople and sortagates to be blurred, then it's going to be pretty hard for me to be sympathetic when some stupid mistake from a sortagate blows up the news cycle for a day.  As far as I'm concerned, once a problem is identified, if you don't stop facilitating it, then you're complicit.

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This morning I was pleasantly surprised to read an article that had Fox TV News as the subject. In this particular article by David Carr, "When Fox News is the Story" (New York Times, July 7, 2008), I read how Fox News responds to bad press from other news outlets. The way that Fox responds to what it deems as damaging to its image, was a real eye-opener. Since I do not write very many articles that would capture the attention of Fox TV, reading about how other journalists deal with Fox when they circle their wagons, so to speak, was fascinating.

I had always thought that the best way to stop calling attention to a situation that could be damaging to one's reputation was to ignore whatever drew attention to you in the first place. The logic behind this was that once you called attention to whatever damaged you in the first place; you gave that particular bit of information credibility, and at the same time keeping people's attention on the damage to your reputation by the very act of defending yourself. It appears that Fox does not subscribe to that view of how to defend your credibility. In a very well written piece, Carr describes how Fox goes on the offensive as soon as a threat to their integrity surfaces. I can understand why Fox is so particular about maintaining their credibility; they are so biased towards the right wing of the political spectrum, their objectivity is indeed suspect much of the time.

One particular example of Fox slanting the news is how they defended themselves from an article that they believed was biased towards the news channel. Jacques Steinberg wrote a piece about how CNN was catching up to Fox in the ratings. Mr. Steinberg tried to reach Fox for a comment and they ignored him, while at the same time complaining to his bosses that he hadn't tried to call them for a comment on his story. This apparently was an attempt to discredit him as a journalist by not allowing Fox to comment. They also ran a story of their own, calling Steinberg an "attack dog" for his boss, Steven V. Reddicliffe, and running a picture of Steinberg that had been altered to make Steinberg appear in Carr's words; "In a technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda, his ears were pulled out, his teeth splayed apart, his forehead lowered and his nose was widened and enlarged in a way that made him look more like Fagin than the guy I work with." Carr also described how the German's often used this technique during World War II in photos. "Media Matters" in a critique of Fox, ran two photos, one real and the one that was altered of Mr. Steinberg, this is one reason that I subscribe to their newsletters.