Needlenose

Some real journalism coming out of AP.

See what happens when Ron Fournier is out getting drunk at the post-Palin-speech bashes.

Congratulations to ace reporter Dan Balz and his editors for prying out this scoop in today’s Washington Post story on the presidential race:

. . . McCain advisers think their candidate matches up well against those potential vulnerabilities in Obama. “This guy’s . . . weaknesses are all John’s strengths,” said one McCain adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly about strategy.

Damn! You can tell a sizzling quote like that had to be kept off the record. No way the source could risk having his name tied to something like that.

Anyone remember the good old days when newspapers were supposedly adopting stricter guidelines on using anonymous sources? I guess it’s probably no surprise that it hasn’t had much effect.

I only mentioned it obliquely, but about a week ago the corporate media amused itself by willfully misinterpreting some of Barack Obama’s statements about Iraq — at the behest of the McCain campaign as it tried to establish the traditional “flip-flopper” narrative about a Democratic presidential candidate. Â Scolded for this, the press responded by taunting Obama, saying it was his fault he couldn’t stop them from lying:

Two days ago, Senator Barack Obama said he had not been clear enough in explaining his Iraq policy. Today, there was a different rationale.

The confusion was not his fault, Mr. Obama said, but rather the media’s for seizing on three words he uttered in Fargo, N.D., when he suggested he would be open to “refine my policies” on Iraq.

“I was surprised by how finely calibrated every single word was measured,” he said, speaking to reporters as he flew here from Montana.

. . . Aides later conceded that Mr. Obama knows the office he seeks – the Oval Office – comes with a job description of calibrating and measuring every single word.

This tilted playing field, where Obama’s words get twisted and the press blames him for it, even as they give a pass to McCain’s gaffes, is going to be an ongoing factor in the fall campaign. Â But what’s a candidate to do when reporters essentially rub their double standard in his face?

Obviously, holding another press conference isn’t going to do much good.  So Obama’s gone a different route — offering a lengthy, exclusive interview to CNN yesterday, publishing an op-ed on Iraq in the New York Times the same day, and now announcing a major speech on the subject for tomorrow.

It’s all an effort to avoid having his positions run through the journalistic meatgrinder before they get to the public, stating his policies so clearly and loudly in so many forums that it drowns out the chatter of reporters and Republicans trying to obscure them.

I’m sure Obama will have to do this any number of times between now and November. Â But it’s good that his campaign already understands that if Barack wants to get his message out clearly, he’ll have to do it himself.

Via ThinkProgress and Media Matters, it seems that Fox News was miffed enough at a New York Times story on its declining ratings to not only do a video segment attacking the NYT, but also alter photographs it showed of the reporters:

It doesn’t take much knowledge of history to guess at the inspiration for Fox News here. Just like old times, apparently.

Famed fossil establishment pundit David Broder wrote in the Washington Post last Sunday:

We are barely at the beginning of the long period in which most Americans will give their first serious scrutiny to the presidential candidates and decide whether Barack Obama or John McCain will get their vote.

. . . What may be crucial in the end is whether people become comfortable with the prospect of Obama as their president.

McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura. Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating.

As John Amato noticed, the Post’s Chris Cillizza (in his “The Fix” blog) quickly stepped up to amplify the message, reminding everyone that Broder is “required reading for anyone who calls himself a political junkie. The Dean of the political press corps, Broder has been setting conventional wisdom in campaigns for longer than The Fix has been on earth.”

Nevertheless, the Post seems to be worried about stragglers who were out of town and didn’t check the paper over the weekend. Â And so (via Brad at Sadly, No! — I don’t go looking for this crap on my own, y’now), columnist Richard Cohen picks up the theme today, explicitly endorsing the same double standard outlined by Broder that Obama’s “reversal on campaign financing and his transparently false justification of it matter more than similar acts by McCain.”

Two major op-ed pieces in three days laying out the company line that McCain can lie and double-talk as much as he wants, but only Obama’s “character” will be scrutinized. Â Did WaPo editorial page honcho Fred Hiatt give marching orders, or what?

As you may have heard, MoveOn.org has a new ad about John McCain’s desire to keep troops in Iraq for 100 years or more:

As Digby sums up, the conventional-wisdom machine is gearing up to denounce this ad specifically because it’s so effective at reaching for viewers’ emotions — led by the Washington Post‘s Chris Cilizza and MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, the cry is that it’s not fair for liberals to be persuasive to use children to make a political point.

Because, as we all know, conservatives would never stoop so low:

I don’t know if there’s any record of Cilizza, Todd, or any other corporate media types objecting to the manipulation of emotions in this infamous 2004 ad. Â I’m sure they must have, right?

Update: Turns out I inadvertently channeled a nearly identical post by Matt Stoller yesterday. I guess my Technorati search chops aren’t what I thought they were…

Markos, on the Associated Press briefly threatening bloggers who reproduce AP stories:

Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I’m going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I’ve got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP — an organization famous for taking its members work without credit — will either back down and shut the hell up, or we’ll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.

I guess I’ll keep citing the AP as appropriate here as well.