Journalists Predict Scrutiny of McCain . . . Some DayBy 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:
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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