Why Attacking the Press Never Works

The Columbia Journalism Review revealed this week that the "high command" of the John McCain campaign hired a blogger "to attack" and engage in "bullying" the press during the last six months of the presidential campaign.

Gee, how did that work out? Help much?

And why did the campaign need to hire outside help for that? I thought it had been doing a pretty good job of not liking the press on its own.

The blogger, Michael Goldfarb, who was hired by the McCain people from The Weekly Standard, appears to be a pretty reasonable guy in the CJR interview. The McCain campaign, he says, "assured me that they were looking for someone to attack the press. And that struck me as a really bad idea, but when a presidential campaign calls up and offers you a job, you take it."

One of the things Goldfarb reveals is that the McCain campaign was going to throw The New York Times off the campaign plane (presumably when it was on the ground). Goldfarb wrote a memo that was supposed to explain that decision to the public, but the idea was dropped.

Some other reporters were banned from the McCain campaign plane, however. Joe Klein, a columnist for Time, was not allowed on the McCain or Sarah Palin planes in the last four months of the campaign, though other Time reporters were. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that she had been banned by the McCain campaign, though other Times reporters were allowed to travel. (The media pay for their seats on the plane, by the way. They are not asking for free rides, just the ability to cover the candidate.)

Barring reporters is rarely done by campaigns. In 1988, when televangelist Pat Robertson ran for president, he banned T.R. Reid of The Washington Post from his plane after Reid wrote a profile of Robertson containing numerous embarrassing revelations. Reid continued to follow the campaign on commercial flights, and of course, his being barred from the plane became a story.

Which is the problem with barring reporters.

Smart campaigns know that it's a waste of time to attack and ban the media. Seducing the media is much more productive.

Attacking the media is a waste because it is not an issue voters care about. Many voters already have a low opinion of the media, and it is unlikely that a campaign can lower it further. All it does is make the campaign look petulant.

What is surprising about the McCain campaign's decision is that it had an example of what happens when you give the media all the access they want: This is what McCain did in 2000, and although he didn't win the nomination that year, it wasn't because of his press coverage. His press coverage was almost always great.

And even when it wasn't great, he didn't complain about it.

When I first climbed aboard McCain's campaign bus in 1999, I, too, enjoyed his great storytelling and constant schmoozing with reporters. But I also noticed some reporters tended to protect him from himself. I was not the first journalist on the bus to hear McCain use the word "gooks" to describe his North Vietnamese captors, but I was the first to print it in a piece that appeared in U.S. News & World Report on Sept. 27, 1999.

It caused trouble for McCain, but he never gave me a hard time about it, never kicked me off the bus, never denied me an interview. In fact, his attitude was a simple one: If he said it, he was responsible for it.

I asked him why he spent so much time with reporters in the back of the bus, when most candidates spent their time huddled with their staff in the front of the bus.

"Other campaigns I've seen, you see this kind of almost a class thing, you know what I mean?" McCain told me. "They're back there, and you're up here. One out of a hundred (reporters) may be trying to sandbag you, but that's a risk you take."

By 2008, it was a risk his campaign was increasingly unwilling to take, and what good did it do it to hire a press "attacker"? Did it get McCain better press? More votes?

Personally, I try to follow a simple rule in covering the candidates: I try to be equally unfair to everyone. One out of a hundred candidates will try to sandbag you, but that's a risk you take.

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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