More Straight Talk From McCain About Media: His Camp Claims To "Welcome" Bad Press
April 12, 2007 -- 10:32 AM EST // //
This is a small thing, but it's pretty amusing: The McCain camp is now saying that they're happy about all the dismal press he has been getting as a result of his Baghdad Stroll and his tireless advocacy of the war. They're saying the bad press is good for him.
Check this out from today's New York Times:
Further, some recent critical reporting by newspapers and television networks of Mr. McCain’s trip to Baghdad last week has paradoxically been clearly welcomed in the McCain camp; one reason conservatives have been wary of him is because he is perceived as being close to the news media, and Mr. McCain made note of that in his speech.“I just returned from my fifth visit to Iraq,” he said. “Unlike the veterans here today, I risked nothing more threatening than a hostile press corps.”
Funny -- that isn't what the McCain camp was saying only a few days ago. On Saturday, The Washington Post interviewed McCain supporter and GOP Rep. Rick Renzi as follows:
Renzi said McCain was frustrated with the media coverage of their visit to the marketplace and what he described as an unwillingness to cover positive news from Iraq.
So when McCain's advisers want to argue that his Baghdad Stroll didn't look as ridiculous as it actually did and that things are going much better in Iraq than they really are, the spin is that they're unhappy with the media's coverage. But now that the McCain camp is trying to change the subject to how well they're appealing solely to Republican Primary voters, they suddenly no longer care about the media's allegedly misleading coverage of the war, and are suddenly happy about the media's bad coverage of him, because it lets him use the media as a foil. I wonder which version is true?
To visit the homepage of this blog, where you can see many more posts, click here.