Defeat the Press

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Illustration by Francisco Caceres McCain and Palin: Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty

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The Republican National Convention (RNC) heaped scorn not just on Barack Obama but also on his running mate, who apparently goes by the name Themedia Elite. And no wonder, because this Themedia Elite guy sounds like a tool. Incredibly sexist. Incorrigibly liberal. Laughs at regular folks. Windsurfs on a board made of arugula.

Well, John McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, made it clear that she was not running to seek Themedia Elite's approval. Palin, who majored in journalism but has since seen the error of her ways, not only out-celebritied Obama but also showed him how real celebrities handle the press.

Real celebrities don't make themselves available to every Tom, Dick and Katie. They play hard to get. And they have hard-nosed handlers, like McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, who vowed that Palin would not do interviews until the media "treat her with some level of respect and deference."

Soon after, Palin agreed to her first (and so far only) postnomination TV interview, with ABC's Charles Gibson, who had just blogged that controversies like Palin's husband's membership in a secessionist party and her daughter's pregnancy "are issues of family and should remain so." Deference accomplished!

Since McCain-Palin declared war on the media, some pundits have said running against the press is a loser's strategy. In fact, it would be malpractice not to. Even leaving aside the success of Nixon-Agnew vs. the "nattering nabobs of negativism" and of Bush-Cheney vs. Dan Rather, the most important audience for media-bashing is not voters but the media themselves.

Journalists may not like to admit it, but cowing the media works. Not always, not with everyone, but--with a polarized audience, commercial pressures and constant self-doubt about fairness--it can succeed. It was after Hillary Clinton and SNL accused the media of coddling Obama that coverage of him turned sharp. If you want to amplify your message, make it about the media because the press finds itself the most fascinating subject of all.

Take the manufactured Oprah-Palin controversy. Oprah Winfrey endorsed Obama in 2007 and said she would not have him or any other candidates on her show again until after the election. The Drudge Report ran a story that Oprah had "banned" Palin, although 1) Oprah had also de facto "banned" McCain, Joe Biden and Obama, and 2) it's uncertain that Palin even wanted to be interviewed by Obama's most famous backer. Nonetheless, it became a big story. Tom Brokaw asked whether Oprah's decision was "élitist," probably the first and last time the term will ever be applied to her show.

At MSNBC, meanwhile, bias charges were the tipping point in a major shake-up. Taking a page from Fox News, the cable network has cultivated opinionated, left-of-center hosts like Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann. This juiced MSNBC's ratings, but it threatened the perceived neutrality of Brian Williams et al. and thus the larger NBC News sister brand. When delegates chanted "NBC! NBC!" during the media-bashing at the RNC--and not in the good "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" way--it amounted to a massive negative ad on six networks. The following Monday, NBC announced that Matthews and Olbermann would no longer anchor election-night coverage.

Will critics of bias be satisfied? No. There's too much incentive to move the goalposts. Thus McCain surrogates took one case of gender bias--Palin's being asked if she could be both a VP and a mom--and extrapolated from it that questioning her experience must also be sexist. And they also blamed the media for a feeding frenzy over Bristol Palin's pregnancy, when in fact the story had emerged much like John Edwards' affair: mainstream media aired it after the principals volunteered it, pushed by rumors on blogs. It's easy to run against the media in the Internet age, when the media are everything from the Washington Post to the Daily Kos comments section. If you can roll them together and pressure some outlets to "balance" an offense they never committed, that's priceless.

To be fair, it's not only Republicans who run against the media. In the primary, Obama and his rivals all but boycotted Fox News, a blatant pander to members of their party's base who don't like Fox's conservative hosts. And Obama's partisans cried bias over an ABC debate during the primaries that focused heavily on Jeremiah Wright and was moderated by ... Gibson, who just got the nod from Palin.

Obama will have a hard time complaining about that now, though, having been established in the narrative as the media's darling, even as the press fixates on the new, fascinating celeb who keeps it at arm's length--waiting, wanting and wondering.

See, that's the other thing about this Themedia Elite. He's one fickle bastard.

Read James Poniewozik's blog at time.com/tunedin

(See photos of Sarah Palin on the campaign trail here).

(See photos of John McCain on the campaign trail here).

(See photos of John McCain on the campaign trail here).