The Summer of Love

The media has a high-school crush on Barack Obama. So says John McCain. And he doesn't care. Not one bit. I swear. But he is doing the campaign equivalent of passing notes in class. McCain's web site is showing two versions of a video documenting the press and the punditocracy, and asking the rest of the kids to check their favorite.

The first choice is set to Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You". The second -- same footage, same singer, different song, "My Eyes Adore You."

We here at NPR are scrupulously objective on such matters --- though objectively I have to say the "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" is by far the punchier pick. And it was leading at about 85 percent of the vote when last checked.

The video is funny, but not subtle --- mostly a compilation of MSNBC's Chris Matthews' excited on-air utterances, with a dollop of the now-infamous remarks by NBC's Lee Cowan about the infectious excitement of covering an Obama rally. (NBC's Brian Williams, among others, has defended Cowan's comments, saying he was simply trying to characterize what it was like from a human standpoint to attend such events.) And as my colleague Mike Pesca points out, most of the others are conservative commentators or Hillary Clinton loyalists proclaiming the press was unfair amidst the hard-fought Democratic primary.

All three network anchors flew abroad for "exclusive" sit-down interviews with Obama (several network correspondents got a crack too), leading some media critics to observe that the Illinois Senator was getting treatment usually reserved for actual Presidents. And the McCain camp was further enraged after his rebuttal to an earlier Obama opinion piece published in the New York Times was rejected by the paper's opinion editor. (The dustup was leaked to The Drudge Report, and the column later appeared in the New York Post.)

So McCain, himself a media darling during his 2000 primary run and something of one again this season, clearly feels nettled by what he sees as favored status conferred on the presumptive Democratic candidate. He spoke Monday in Kennebunkport, Maine, accompanied by former President George H.W. Bush, who said he was "a little jealous" of all the attention and hoopla accompanying Obama's trip abroad.

One of the most interesting elements: television consultant Andrew Tyndall's database shows Obama received far more coverage than McCain from the network anchors, and the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that holds for the rest of the major media as well. That doesn't mean he gets more favorable treatment; the stories were mixed. But it does tend to drown out coverage of McCain.

McCain is raising money off the partially self-generated flap, sending an email to supporters accompanying the video that claims the press has "a bizarre fascination with Barack Obama."

So while he may not be getting TV love, McCain is angling for advantage by taking a page from the conventional Republican playbook -- campaigning against the media.

--- David Folkenflik

1:29 PM ET | 07-22-2008 | permalink

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