WASHINGTON // When Democrats and Republicans are not blaming each other for the broken economy or trading barbs over how to fix it, they are busy heaping insults on a shared scapegoat: the press. Most recently it has been Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, who routinely accuses the "media elite" of what she and her running mate, John McCain, refer to as "gotcha journalism". Explaining her recent poor performances in nationally televised interviews - in which she stumbled over basic questions - Mrs Palin told the conservative-leaning Fox News that it was more the journalists' fault than it was hers. "The Sarah Palin in those interviews is a little bit annoyed," she said. "Because it's like, no matter what you say, you're going to get clobbered." Such criticisms appear to be part of a broader campaign strategy of attacking the press. Two weeks ago, Steve Schmidt, the Republican strategist, accused The New York Times of "advocacy" on Barack Obama's behalf after the newspaper published an unflattering article about another McCain aide. "It is an organisation that has made a decision to cast aside its journalistic integrity to advocate for the defeat of John McCain." But Mr Obama, the Democratic candidate, has also got in on the act. When Republicans seized on his "lipstick on a pig" comment last month, suggesting that the Democrat was making a sexist reference to Mrs Palin, Mr Obama pinned some of the blame on journalists. "It would be funny except of course the news media decided that that was the lead story yesterday," said Mr Obama, who frequently chastises reporters for focusing on "trivia" instead of the issues. To most presscard-carrying members of the Fourth Estate, the derision is little more than a game of "blame the messenger" that helps candidates skirt politically inconvenient truths. "It's a way for them to deflect legitimate questions," said Tom Huang, an editor at The Dallas Morning News and a fellow at the Poynter Institute in Florida. But there is another reason candidates do it: it resonates with voters. Fifty-five per cent of US citizens believe the media is politically biased, according to a July 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Seventy per cent of Republicans consider the press biased compared with 29 per cent of Democrats. The current presidential campaign has done little to squelch those perceptions. In fact, many Republicans believe the media is caught up in a love affair with Mr Obama and is more slanted - and more worthy of derision - than ever before. "This election has been noticeably different than any other election in how the media has completely thrown in on one candidate and that candidate is Barack Obama," said John Feehery, a Republican strategist. "The media is much more liberal than the American people ? the interesting thing is that in this campaign they have let their emotions get the best of them." The irony is that Mr McCain once had a love affair of his own with the press, even jesting that a group of reporters was his "base" in 2005. But that relationship has cooled considerably since he became his party's nominee for president. Republicans gripe most about the coverage of the outspoken Mrs Palin, saying she has been unfairly scrutinised on the issue of experience - she was a small-town mayor before becoming governor less than two years ago. Top aides to Mr McCain habitually accuse the media of sexism. The recent spat between the McCain camp and The New York Times is the latest in a spate of flare-ups this election year, starting, perhaps, with a story that suggested Mr McCain had an inappropriate relationship with a lobbyist. The article failed to provide evidence of the affair and the newspaper's own public editor, whose job is to investigate complaints about the newspaper's coverage, said it was unfair to Mr McCain. Few journalists claim to be perfect. "No one in the world would be able to say the media are blameless and they don't deserve criticism," said Mark Jurkowitz, a former ombudsman and media writer at The Boston Globe and now associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. But "if you are going to complain about everything, even the good stories, it is going perhaps to give less weight to a complaint that is legitimate". Mark Mellman, a Democratic strategist whose clients include the majority leaders of the House and Senate, dismissed the Republican complaints as "a cry for help". "Honestly, when campaigns attack the media, by and large it means they're losing," he said. But the attacks come from both sides of the aisle, when candidates are up and down. During the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton decried the same favouritism towards Mr Obama that frazzles Republicans now. And in July, Mr Obama took issue with the "conservative" press for targeting his wife, Michelle, in a "pretty systematic way". Some outlets questioned her patriotism after she said at a rally that she was "proud" of her country for the first time in her adult life. Paul Waldman, senior fellow with Media Matters for America, a progressive watchdog that says its mission is to correct "conservative misinformation", called the notion that the press has been softer on Mr Obama "farcical," citing the weeks of coverage devoted to the controversial comments of Mr Obama's former pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright. Mr Waldman, who wrote Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, points to examples of conservative bias in the mainstream press, including the tendency of writers to describe Mr McCain as a "maverick" or to refer to his campaign bus by its Republican-given name: the "Straight Talk Express". "If reporters repeated campaign slogans from any other campaigns, they'd be laughed out of the newsroom," he said. Then again, that probably depends on the newsroom. Nowadays, there is such an array of media on the conservative to liberal spectrum that Republicans and Democrats should be able to find a version of news they like. "I don't think anybody thinks today that the media are unbiased," said Tony Marsh, a Republican political consultant who worked on both of Ronald Reagan's presidential bids and claims that most major US newspapers are "press organs of the Obama campaign". "What we hope today is that there are enough media outlets with enough opposing perspectives that they balance each other out," he said. sstanek@thenational.ae
