The Media Bent Over For McCain And They Can't Get Up

The traditional media was for the most part in the pocket of the McCain camp for quite sometime, even before he had a "camp" so to speak. They loved his brazen remarks and random statements that bucked his supposedly more conservative party. Now that he has become a tool of the neo-con right they aren't so fond of him, but as Eric Boehlert of Media Matters points out, McCain's campaign could care less.

From Media Matters:

Did you hear the media are mad? According to Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post, the press is angry at McCain for his patently untrue lipstick attack ("It's false. It's ridiculous"), and they're seething over how Sarah Palin keeps telling her demonstrably false Bridge to Nowhere tale even after members of the media pointed out her stump-speech applause line was a lie. (A "whopper.")

During the past week, virtually every major news outlet has produced welcomed, hard-edged fact-checking pieces about how the Republican ticket goes far beyond bending the truth and just plain snaps it out on the campaign trail.

In the past, that kind of truth-telling would have embarrassed campaigns and likely caused a dramatic change in the rhetoric. But what do McCain and Palin do in response? They pretty much ignore the press and its critiques.

Writing on The New Republic's website, Eve Fairbanks spelled out the conundrum, capturing the dumbfounded realization that spread through the press corps. It's like that scene in a movie when the superhero realizes his unique power (for the press, it's collective indignation) has suddenly been rendered useless:

Reporters demolished the claim that the Palin opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, and yet the McCain campaign insolently still uses it. Writers dismantled the McCain campaign's untrue assertion that Barack Obama compared Sarah Palin to a pig yesterday, and yet the campaign put out an audacious ad featuring the ridiculous allegation, presumably on the assumption that Real Americans don't care what the elite press says anyway.

Real Americans care about what the media says, they just put it into context. Boehlert points out that most people just don't pay attention to them as much because most of what Chris Matthews et al put out is complete garbage. The author cites several examples from the current election season as well as Kerry's windsurfing from four years ago. However there is a silver lining. If the media would keep reporting facts and times when candidates lie for more than fifteen minutes, then people will start paying more attention.