Reporters Kicked Off Obama Plane

Citing space concerns, the Obama campaign "has told three reporters they have to drop off the campaign plane this weekend. All three work for papers that endorsed Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.: the New York Post, the Washington Times, and the Dallas Morning News."

Online Only

NYT: After a century of continuous publication, The Christian Science Monitor will abandon its weekday print edition and appear online only, its publisher announced Tuesday. The cost-cutting measure makes The Monitor the first national newspaper to essentially give up on print.

A New Limbaugh?

A Florida anchor's questions for Biden shock the Senator.

Biden seems quite taken aback by the anchor's questions, at one point asking her, "Are you joking? Is this is a joke? Or is that a real question?"

Update: A reader points out this video where you can see how Barbara West, the same anchor, treats John McCain. Compare the two interviews for yourself. I'd say she's in the tank. (Thanks for the tip, dgc360.)

Update 2: Here's a better video of the Biden interview.

Briefs from the Presidential Race, 10/22/08

McCain buys ad time in Indiana for the first time.

Pew analysis shows that equal media coverage for McCain and Obama. Coverage of McCain is twice as negative as that of Obama.

Palin is now more accessible to the media than Biden.

Washington Post reports on support for McCain on the Al-Qaida Web sites.

McCain camp pushes back on the WP article. Think Progress headline: When Terrorist Endorses Obama, It's for real; When One Endorses McCain, It's a Head Fake.

Jake Tapper notes that not all of the hatred is on the right.

Alaska paid for Palin daughters to travel.

Giuliani robo-calls hit Obama for being soft on crime. Calls reported in Minnesota, Colorado, and Virginia.

McCain Campaign Bans Dowd

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette provides more details on reports that NYT columnist Maureen Dowd was banned from traveling with the McCain and Palin campaigns.

It all started when Maureen covered an Aug. 30 McCain-Palin rally in Washington, Pa., then wasn't let on the McCain plane afterward, forcing her to overnight at a Pittsburgh airport hotel while the traveling press went on without her.

"I had had a great relationship with John McCain for 16 years, through columns he liked and didn't like. So at first I thought it was a mistake and doublechecked with the press office. They said I was banned from both planes for 'the foreseeable future.' Then [McCain spokeswoman] Nicole Wallace was gloating about it to reporters on the Palin plane," Dowd wrote in an email.

"It was disappointing because I didn't think John McCain would ever be as dismissive of the First Amendment as Dick Cheney."

It bears mentioning that the McCain camp has declared all-out war on the Times, and is being protective of Palin with everyone in the media, but especially someone as adroit and experienced as Maureen. (emphasis added)

McCain's Media Wars

The McCain camp may be able to energize their supporters by trying to paint the media as biased and liberal but I wonder if their attempts to vilify the media will backfire. Like it or not, McCain still needs the media to get his message out.

First, the McCain camp launches a scathing attack on The New York Times. Then in a conference call organized to chide the media on the stories about Obama and Biden that haven't received coverage in the media, the examples provided were so ridden with errors, that Ben Smith thinks the call backfired on the campaign. When he tried to ask the campaign about the inaccuracies, he was accused of "quibbling with ridiculously small details when the basic things are completely right.” Here's an extract detailing the inaccuracies:

Schmidt criticized the press for the relatively sparse coverage of the fact that one of Biden’s sons, Hunter, is a registered federal lobbyist.

“His son is a lobbyist for the credit card and banking industry,” Schmidt said.

But Hunter Biden’s lobbying clients don’t include any banks or credit card companies. He did work, as a vice president and then as a consultant, for MBNA, a Delaware-based bank and credit card giant to which Biden had close ties. But he does not appear to have lobbied for the firm.

“Steve Schmidt lied — or just got it flat wrong," said Biden spokesman David Wade. "Hunter Biden has never — never — been a lobbyist for the credit card or banking industry."

Schmidt attacked Obama for his ties to William Ayers, who has spoken of his role in 1960s anti-war bombings committed by the Weather Underground.

"What we know for sure, and is beyond debate and argumentation is this: Senator Obama said that William Ayers is a guy that lives in his neighborhood. We know that that is a disingenuous and untruthful answer,” Schmidt said.

“Senator Obama began his political career in its early stages raising money at Ayers’ house,” he said.

Obama did hold a 1995 campaign event at Ayers’ house. It was not, however, a fundraiser, and Ayers did not contribute money to Obama’s first campaign, according to Illinois records.

Schmidt also complained of Obama backers’ attacks on McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“As soon as Gov. Palin was nominated, one of … Obama’s chief campaign surrogates, [Florida Rep.] Robert Wexler, went out and accused her of being a Nazi sympathizer,” Schmidt said. “Where is the outrage to that aspersion on the part of some of the biggest newspapers in the country?”

But Wexler didn’t call Palin a Nazi sympathizer. He called former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan a Nazi sympathizer, and attacked Palin for allegedly having endorsed him.

“John McCain's decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans. Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel,” Wexler said.

(Wexler was apparently wrong: Though Buchanan claimed that Palin had supported him, she said she backed Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000, and no evidence has emerged to the contrary.)

Another McCain aide accused Smith of being "in the tank" because he asked the campaign "to back up some basic claims made by a senior strategist in a public conference call."

It's been a month and nine days since McCain held a press conference. Since Palin was picked, she's given exactly two interviews, has not held any press conferences, and is not available to the press corps accompanying her on the campaign trail.

A Washington Post editorial reads:

Mr. McCain's selection of an inexperienced and relatively unknown figure was unsettling, and the campaign's decision to keep her sequestered from serious interchanges with reporters and voters serves only to deepen the unease. Mr. McCain is entitled to choose the person he thinks would be best for the job. He is not entitled to keep the public from being able to make an informed assessment of that judgment. Ms. Palin's speech-making skills are impressive, but the more she repeats the same stump speech lines, the queasier we get. Nor have her answers to the gentle questioning she has encountered provided any confidence that Ms. Palin has a grasp of the issues.

All this from a candidate that used to consider the national media his "base."

Hiding from the Press

Why is the press covering these staged rallies?

For a candidate who once railed against “stale soundbites, staged rallies and over-managed messages,” John McCain seems to have turned over a new leaf.

Today marks the four-week anniversary since McCain held his last press conference (8/13 in Birmingham, MI) and three weeks since his last public town hall meeting (8/20 in Las Cruces, NM).

McCain’s new campaign strategy: staged rallies with thousands of supporters. Since announcing Sarah Palin as his VP choice on August 29, McCain’s has appeared at 11 rallies with his new running mate where both members of the ticket delivered a 10-15 minute stump speech.

--- From Fox News via Political Wire

McCain’s Media Strategy: Genius and Disingenuous

Let’s give credit where it’s due. The creative folks behind the McCain ads are fantastic. The ads are well produced in that they include a clever use of visuals, audio, and various hooks to draw the viewer’s attention. The message is concise and clear. All of these make for a technically good ad, even though the content of the ads is often misleading and sometimes despicable.

There is a method to the madness, though.

The first stroke of brilliance is in sending out ads to media sources as though they were intended for actual air-time. The idea is that the media will discuss the ads and spread the word about the new ad, which will actually never run on TV. So, for the relatively measly cost of producing the ad, the media will air it for free.

“The ad, which the campaign says will air in key states, which like many in this campaign was made available on the web, had more than 90,000 hits on YouTube about six hours after its release. The additional value of the web advertisements is that they attract free news media coverage even if they never air anywhere at all on a paid basis.”

-- CQ Politics on McCain’s latest ad

Marc Ambinder suggests that these not-for-broadcast ads are simply video press releases and he refuses to link to them.

New rule: if I'm not entirely confident that an advertising buy is real, I'm not going to link to it. Yes, you can easily find it elsewhere. But consider it a tiny moral protest against video press releases.

But he still discusses them, and there are others (including me) who will show the ad, or link to it, or discuss it ad (pun intended) nauseam. Not a bad return on relatively minimal investment, is it?

The second strategy is to use sensationalism to attract attention, facts be damned.

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said the campaign is entering a stage in which skirmishes over the facts are less important than the dominant themes that are forming voters' opinions of the candidates.

"The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent," Feehery said. "As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

– Alan Greenblatt citing an article in The Washington Post

Factual distortions, the McCain camp hopes, will be inconsequential and the misleading message will be perceived as the truth if it is repeated enough times. Palin’s late conversion on the Bridge to Nowhere is a perfect example. The accuracy of McCain’s claim that Palin has (always) opposed the Bridge to Nowhere has been called questionable by multiple sources. Yet, Think Progress’ running counter has found 23 instances where this claim has been repeated recently by McCain and/or Palin.

And if factual distortions are not a concern, why should insignificant bits like copyrights matter? Think Progress documents six instances where McCain camp has been the subject of copyright complaints.

McCain has made much of the fact that he accepted public financing while Obama didn’t. Poor John McCain, he is restricted to spending only $84 million! Well, there’s a loophole here as well.

Most of the campaign ads that Sen. John McCain began airing Sept. 1 are taking a glancing shot at Democrats in Congress -- often just a two-second jab at the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid.

This is not because the McCain campaign has suddenly decided the best strategy to defeat Sen. Barack Obama is to run against other top Democrats in Congress. It's because of a loophole in the public financing laws that allows McCain to evenly split the cost of his ads with the Republican Party so long as the ads make at least a passing reference to the rest of the party's ticket.

-- Matthew Mosk, Washington Post

(I had remarked in an earlier post that it seemed odd that McCain would feature obscure Democratic Senators in his ad. Now we know why McCain’s ad featured Byron Dorgan (D-ND)!)

Will McCain’s media strategy work? Alan Greenblatt seems to think that the press is starting to sour on McCain. I'll believe it when I see it. After all yesterday’s top (non-)story was Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment.