Entire Establishment Press Corps Death Spiral Watch

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Jim Rutenberg reports on how the entire establishment press corps is upset: they went into the tank for John McCain, and yet he doesn't like them anymore:

Old Friends in the Media See a New Side of McCain: When Republicans gathered at Madison Square Garden... four years ago, Senator John McCain gathered at a restaurant uptown with some of the biggest stars in journalism to celebrate his birthday... Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Bob Schieffer, Maureen Dowd, Tim Russert.... Those there that night now feel as if they are living in some sort of alternate reality in the Xcel Energy Center here.... McCain’s aides have sent out news releases criticizing individual reporters.... They have canceled an interview with Larry King.... They have dismissed as “fiction” an article in The New York Times about the process of vetting Ms. Palin.... McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, has accused journalists here of pursuing a “mission to destroy” Ms. Palin with “a new level of viciousness.”... McCain’s campaign has made its anti-news-media message central to the convention program here....

Peggy Noonan... writing that Ms. Palin “could become a transformative political presence.”... But, seeming to undermine the campaign’s argument that questions about Ms. Palin stem from bias, Ms. Noonan was heard on a live microphone on MSNBC answering a question about Ms. Palin’s experience: “Most qualified?” she said. “No.” Using a barnyard epithet, she said Mr. McCain had chosen Ms. Palin more for her personal story.... A former McCain strategist, Mike Murphy, agreed, saying, “The greatest of McCain is no cynicism, and it is cynical.”... [T]he campaign’s attacks on the news media have been viewed by journalists and some strategists here as also serving tactical needs. Among them are to build a case that Ms. Palin is a victim of sexism, to change the subject, or, in the words of Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, “to put boundaries on the press’s pursuit of the Palin story.”

That Mr. McCain is behind these emphatic attacks has startled... those journalists who have known Mr. McCain longest. “Probably no one in American politics over the last 20 years has had a closer relationship with the national press than John McCain,” said Albert R. Hunt.... Mr. Schieffer, of CBS, said, “It’s just kind of odd.”

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Comments

[Lee A. Arnold]

Mr Schieffer risks his own credibility. We all know that McCain is one of the few politicians who's been talking off-the-record with reporters for years, and no doubt making lots of funny comments about throwing the right-wing fundamentalists overboard. Then he gives in to the same fundamentalists, instead of choosing his own preferred VP candidate. Naturally the press is likely to ask some dramatic questions on-the-record about this, and McCain would be spurred to unlikely answers, no matter how he hopes to define the permissible bounds.

Perhaps the campaign has gone into a few quick weeks of frantic re-engineering to find a strong path around the debacle. But as soon as the titulars go back in front of the press, it is still going to be dramatic.

There are plenty of questions about Palin's readiness, plenty of questions about McCain's vetting process and his judgment, plenty of questions about the comportment (or lack of same) between the two on several issues of the day.

With only a few months to go, they may not have enough time to sort it out. One possible approach would be to stay away from the press, redefine the campaign in the debates, and then do selected press interviews to rebalance the equation. But the Democrats are no longer the party to stand idly by, and this is going to be brutal.

Brad your headline made me laugh out loud.

[William Smith]

Prof DeLong,
They forgot the wisdom of Mark Twain, "The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right."

[William Smith]

Prof DeLong,
They just forgot Mark Twain's wisdom, "The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right."

[George Darroch]

They're going to attack the press until they start writing nice things about them again. Why? Because it almost always works. And because it feeds on the worldview that hardcore Republicans live in - of a twisted "elite" who refuses to see things as they actually are.