Free Ride: John McCain and the Media

[JI7]

Media Matters fellow and American Prospect columnist Paul Waldman says Sen. McCain’s image as an independent maverick able to take on powerful interests is enabled by a complacent media that overlooks the facts.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Why don’t you start off by talking about the media coverage of this convention culminating in the nomination of John McCain for president?

PAUL WALDMAN: Well, obviously, the coverage was dominated by discussion of Sarah Palin. What really struck me after her speech was just how glowing so much of the coverage was of her speech. “It was a home run.” “It was so spectacular.” And I think that a lot of that had to do with the fact that the reporters who were covering it were actually there at the Republican convention, and who were they getting reactions from? Well, they’re getting reactions from the Republican delegates, who are themselves not just the base of the Republican Party, but kind of the base of the base. Those are the social conservatives who want—who wanted Sarah Palin on the ticket, and they’re so excited about her. But I haven’t seen any evidence, actually, that her speech or her pick was such a gigantic hit with the public at large. I think that oftentimes in a situation like this, the press can get kind of—have blinders on because of the situation that they’re in.

So far, it seems like the reviews of the people who were watching the speech, John McCain’s speech last night, were mostly negative. I mean, anyone who watched it, I think, would know that it was kind of a dud in any number of ways. But they do keep falling back on the same old narrative that they’ve been telling for so long about McCain. I mean, I can read you the lede of the Associated Press report on McCain’s speech. It says, “John McCain, a POW turned political rebel, vowed tonight to vanquish the ‘constant partisan rancor’ that grips Washington as he launched his fall campaign for the White House.” Now, if you’ve been watching the coverage of McCain over the last ten years, you know that almost every story about McCain seems to start with some version of that, that he’s the rebel, he’s the maverick, he was a prisoner of war.

Now, people may have heard this a few or maybe a few hundred times over the last week. That’s one of the most extraordinary things I’ve always found about the coverage of McCain, is that they always say how reluctant he is to talk about the fact that he was a prisoner of war, despite the fact that every single campaign he’s ever run since he first ran for Congress in 1982 has been based on the fact that he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Even last night, on the floor of the convention, after this week of just endless retellings and retellings of the story of his captivity, one of the network reporters said, “Well, you know, his aides must have convinced him finally to talk about the fact that he was a prisoner of war, because he’s so reluctant to talk about it.” He’s not reluctant; he talks about it all the time. But yet, that narrative, like so many of the narratives about John McCain, has managed to persist, just as he and his advisers want it to.

more at http://mwcnews.net/content/view/25037&Itemid=1

[AndyTiedye]

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