Is The Media Falling Out Of Love With McCain?

Eric Boehlert thinks the bloom is off the rose…

Did you hear the media are mad? According to Howard Kurtz at The Washington ost, 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.

Instead of recoiling, the Republican ticket seems to have adopted a post-press approach to campaigning in which the candidates simply don’t care what the press does or says about their honesty. More to the point, the candidates don’t think it will matter on Election Day.

They may be right. And that’s the media’s fault. They’ve reported their way right into the margins. Submerged in trivia and tactics for the past 18 months, the press, I think, has damaged its ability — its authority — to referee the campaign.
Now if they would stop trying to draw false equivalencies between McCain’s repeated lies and Obama’s rhetoric…

Or if the media would just report honestly the critiques coming from Democratic Party spokespeople instead of bringing on McCain proxy after proxy. Or worse, just admitting that giving viewers fact is beyond their pay scale.