John McCain Controls the Airwaves

The McCain campaign has complained for months that Barack Obama is gets too much coverage on major media outlets. John McCain gets the majority of coverage and its mostly glowingly positive. Meanwhile, coverage of Barack Obama is generally negative. McCain shows, over and over, that he doesn’t understand what’s going on. He says the ‘surge’ in Iraq caused the ‘awakening’, but the awakening started long before the surge. Was McCain questioned about this? Hardly. McCain shows he doesn’t know how social security works. He calls the idea that money workers pay into the system goes directly to retirees a “disgrace.” Well, Mr. McCain, social security was designed as a pay-as-you-go system. Does the media question McCain’s misunderstanding of social security? No. Instead, they spent a week talking about how a comment by Jesse Jackson could hurt Obama’s campaign. Obama meets with Hamad Karzai; rather than covering the substance of the meeting, the media questions Obama’s purpose. Coverage of Obama’s overseas trip started, on CNN.com, with a article on how an Obama presidency could hurt black America. This morning, Daniel Shore, a long time commentator on NPR, talked about Obama’s trip. Weekend Edition’s host pushed him, repeatedly, to condemn Obama purpose and finds mistakes in Obama’s performance. John McCain’s complaints regarding media bias are just a show designed to create even greater bias. This is, after all, a politician who has referred to the press as his "base," and a politician about whom MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has said "every last one of them [reporters] would move to Massachusetts and marry John McCain if they could." As Eric Alterman and George Zornick recently explained in The Nation, "no candidate since John F. Kennedy, and perhaps none since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has enjoyed such cozy relations with the press." Jamison Foser, Media Matters for America. If the media reported on John McCain’s slips, mistakes, and senior moments the way they attack Obama’s bowling, this election would already be Bob Dole all over again.