The Press Corps’ Unshakeable Crush on McCain

Some straight talk about the media’s favorite ‘maverick’

By Peter Hart

If you pay even passing attention to national politics, you know that presumptive GOP presidential candidate John McCain is a maverick who bucks his own party’s line and never wavers in his political beliefs. At least, that’s what the corporate media say—reality tells a very different story.

A candidate could only get away with such an elaborate and long-running con with the media as willing accomplices. “The press loves McCain,” explained NBC host Chris Matthews (9/10/06). “We’re his base.”

For much of the press, the early stages of the 2008 presidential campaign were a chance to fall in love all over again. “Those of us on the Straight Talk Express eight years ago got a breathtaking journalistic opportunity: to be inside the lively mind and heart of a leading contender for president,” Newsweek’s Howard Fineman recalled (3/3/08). “McCain was as joyously combative as Popeye and as earnestly confessional as Oprah.”

Fineman was actually restrained when compared to some of the coverage from eight years prior. “I know it shouldn’t be happening, but it is,” wrote Charles Lane in the New Republic (10/18/99). “I’m falling for John McCain.” Lane’s confession was in turn surpassed in awkwardness by another writer in the same magazine: Michael Lewis (9/30/96) declared that his feelings for McCain were like “the war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than to girls.”

more expose on The Media's crush and their Maverick
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3369

“the war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than to girls.”

Man crush?

Journalists Predict Scrutiny of McCain . . . Some Day
By Peter Hart


It’s hardly controversial to point out that many in the corporate media have a fondness for presumptive GOP White House nominee John McCain. The prevailing journalistic attitude was expressed by Washington Post columnist David Broder (4/24/08): “In an age of deep cynicism about politicians of both parties, McCain is the rare exception who is not assumed to be willing to sacrifice personal credibility to prevail in any contest.”

Over the past few months, however, many pundits and reporters have declared that despite the press corps’ feelings for McCain, he will nevertheless face tough scrutiny . . . some day.

After declaring on PBS’s Charlie Rose show (2/8/08) that some of McCain’s rhetoric is beyond criticism (“McCain has a license to use words that the rest of us could not. . . . I mean, he can be pretty out there, using words like ‘surrender,’ because who is really going to question John McCain?”), Newsweek’s Evan Thomas (2/16/08) responded to the idea that the press was fond of McCain and Barack Obama as well:

(big, big chunk missing right here. go to the article link)

McCain’s recent activities do cry out for media coverage. On April 18, McCain released his own tax returns, showing that he has next to no assets in his own name, while keeping his wife’s sizable fortune private—a tactic that attracted intensely skeptical coverage when Sen. John Kerry tried it in 2004 (New York Times, 5/9/04). Or consider McCain’s blaming a bridge collapse last year in Minneapolis on earmark spending—a claim the alleged Straight Talker promptly withdrew (L.A. Times, 5/2/08). Or McCain’s assurance that his energy policy “will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East”—a phrasing that implied that all Mideast wars the U.S. has been involved in are essentially about oil, although McCain later claimed that he was only referring to the 1991 Gulf War (AP, 5/2/08).

Journalism, of course, is supposed to hold politicians to account—not some day, but every day. Putting off scrutiny of John McCain until some imagined future moment is really giving him a free pass in the present—and that’s a journalistic problem that deserves some self-scrutiny.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3566

build mccain up and tear Obama down.

some day.

perhaps
after
November 4th.

accountable? Obama's going to win in spite of the presswhores.

almost everybody hates the corporate media.

The bad thing is almost the entire electorate still listens to them.

The people that can make a difference
in this election
are the same people
who watch the television
where the news
loves John McCain.

Meanwhile, We've got our guy tied up
and the media is piling on
and some as saying we must hold him accountable
or we will be creating a monster.

We are creating a monster alright.

His name is John McCain.