Text 10 When Love Backfires

Reporters have a crush on Barack Obama. Could that help John McCain win the election?

In the closing days of the 1992 presidential campaign, President George H.W. Bush took to waving a bumper sticker with the slogan “Annoy the media – reelect Bush”. Four years later, Senator Bob Dole asked voters to "rise up" against media that were trying to "steal these elections". Complaining about the liberal media is a signature of losing Republican campaigns. It doesn’t work because whining doesn't look presidential and because annoying the media tends to be pretty low on voters' to-do lists.

But now John McCain, who once enjoyed excellent relations with reporters, is criticizing the press. Frustrated by his inability to get attention amid the wall-to-wall coverage of Barack Obama's foreign tour, McCain released a Web ad accusing journalists of nursing crushes on the Democrat. Among the ad's highlights: a clip in which NBC reporter Lee Cowan confesses that "it's almost hard to remain objective" while covering Obama because the energy of his campaign is so "infectious". The ad is lighthearted, but the McCain team's frustration is obvious.

Journalists have put up several lines of self-defense. Obama is on more magazine covers in part, they note, because those issues sell better than McCain covers. McCain is a familiar figure who has been involved in presidential politics for nearly a decade while Obama's rapid rise - from state senator to presidential nominee in four years - is part of what makes him a compelling story.

That McCain's complaint is sometimes overstated and imprudent, however, does not mean that it is wrong. The political press corps has a problem when Jon Stewart lampoons reporters for being even more in the tank for Obama than he is.

Why are the media so smitten with Obama? Journalists have an affinity for the Democratic nominee in part because he is a wordsmith and they make a living manipulating words and symbols, so they have a special appreciation for his gifts. But another part of the reason is, yes, plain old liberal bias. McCain was a press darling when he was a maverick dissenting from the Republican Party from points left. Obama has become one by succeeding as a down the line liberal. When McCain decided this time around to court conservative Republican voters as much as liberal reporters, the coverage of him became more critical. Notice a pattern?

At this point, denying that the press has a liberal tilt, particularly on social issues, is like denying that the universities have one. Surveys of reporters show that they have more liberal views than the public; surveys of the public show that readers and viewers pick up on it. The silver lining for McCain is that the media's bias has sometimes backfired on liberals. One reason gun control and abortion have repeatedly been landmines for Democrats is that reporters never issued any warning signs. The press has long underestimated the political risks in liberalism. Obama's Reverend Wright fiasco was a case in point. Even though the two men have close ties, the press gave little scrutiny to the radical preacher for a year after Obama's campaign began. When attention finally came, Obama gave a speech that tried to shift the focus from their relationship to the rest of the country's racial wounds. He was rewarded with rapturous coverage. The next day, the New York Times ran a "news analysis" calling the speech "hopeful, patriotic [and] quintessentially American" and comparing him to John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. It took a few more weeks for Obama to realize that he had to take the final step and repudiate Wright.

Media bias poses only one serious danger to McCain. One of Obama's standard tactics has been to predict that McCain would "play on our fears", "exploit our differences" and stir up "fake controversy" to win this fall. It's a clever move; it simultaneously paints McCain as a brute while making him think twice about hitting back - the harder McCain hits, after all, the more it will look as though he is stirring up fake controversy. Too many reporters have bought that spin, and that's a problem. McCain doesn't need reporters to fall out of love with Obama. But he does need to be allowed to make the case against the Democrat. (TIME, by Ramesh Ponnuru, August 11, 2009)