Mitt Romney's jaunt was a fiasco -- it said so in the papers, the author says. The media's terrible trip

During his overseas trip, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, traveled to some of our closest allies accompanied by some of his most merciless enemies — the media.

If you don’t know that Romney’s foreign jaunt was the worst diplomatic fiasco since the Zimmermann telegram or the XYZ Affair, you haven’t been reading his press clips.


In Poland, when a few reporters shouted thoughtlessly hostile questions at Romney near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, they nicely encapsulated the tenor of the coverage. A Romney aide, Rick Gorka, told them to “ shove it” — an apt sentiment given the traveling media’s performance throughout the week.

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The press can say, like it or not, it simply played its role. Which is true — if it’s supposed to be querulous, unfair and self-obsessed.

In London, the U.S. press covered the British press’s manufactured outrage over Romney’s Olympics comments. Romney didn’t say anything about the shaky preparations that you couldn’t have read in a British newspaper. That didn’t stop Fleet Street’s gleefully nationalistic piling-on, which gave the accompanying U.S. media its narrative for the trip. In one word: fiasco.

Romney’s Olympics musings were genuinely impolitic and prompted amusing pushback from British Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson. But there was almost no discussion in the U.S. media of whether the British reaction was a little, uh, disproportionate and lacking in the quality once known as stiff upper lip.

On gaffe high alert in Israel, the press fastened on Romney’s observation at a Jerusalem fundraiser that culture has a large hand in Israel’s economic success and, by implication, in the Palestinians’ economic stasis. The Associated Press rushed to Palestinian official Saeb Erekat — last seen falsely alleging an Israel massacre at Jenin — who obligingly called the Romney remark “racist.”

Boom! Mission accomplished: another Romney gaffe.

Two-for-two, the press needed just one more gaffe in Poland to achieve the “mistake-ridden trip” trifecta. Pay dirt came in the “shove it” exchange with the Romney staffer.

Notice the steadily diminishing quality of the Romney miscues. The Romney trip started with the candidate supposedly offending an entire nation; it ended with his traveling press secretary offending three reporters.

No matter. Gorka got nearly as much play as Lech Walesa, the legendary Polish human rights activist and former president, who, unaccountably, endorsed Romney despite his gaffe-plagued foreign trip. Walesa must not be following the twitter feeds of enough American journalists.

The shouted questions were instructive — all emanating from deep within the media’s own narrative. There was: “Do you have a statement for the Palestinians?” Then, there was: “What about your gaffes?” Finally, that original follow-up: “Do you feel that your gaffes have overshadowed your foreign trip?”

Seriously, we send people to journalism school for this? Why not outsource the work to Media Matters and be done with it?

The reporters were said to be boiling over with frustration from lack to access to Romney. But Romney did interviews with Brian Williams and Matt Lauer of NBC, David Muir of ABC, Jan Crawford of CBS, Greta Van Susteren and Carl Cameron of Fox, and Wolf Blitzer and Piers Morgan of CNN. The notorious Olympics gaffe came in the sit-down with Williams.

It’s true that there was a gross imbalance on the trip between the access for TV journalists and for the traveling print reporters. This might make fascinating fodder for a Columbia Journalism Review symposium one day. “Washington Week in Review” should devote a segment to it. Maybe two. Outside of media and political professionals, though, it interests precisely … no one.

Regardless, I thought the hallmark of a professional was hiding your pique rather than giving vent to it and letting it color what you write.

One anonymous reporter told POLITICO’s Dylan Byers that after the indignities of the European trip, “This is rough and tumble now. There are going to be tough questions — the American people want that.”

Yes, the American people can’t wait to hear Romney’s answer to how he feels about his gaffes and other similarly penetrating questions.

The fact is that the press doesn’t need any excuse to be either superficial or unfriendly to Romney. Consider the “culture” comment. Whatever else you think of it, it is interesting. It could have been the occasion for news analysis pieces on the debate over the sources of economic development in general and the economic travails of the Arab world in particular. Instead, all the press cared about was that a Palestinian functionary reflexively deemed it racist.

Meanwhile, back here at home, where no journalists were mistreated by the Romney campaign, Newsweek ran a cover calling the former Massachusetts governor a “wimp.” A publicity stunt with a stitched-together excuse for an article attached, the cover nonetheless made “NBC Nightly News” on Sunday — one of the few segments on the broadcast not related to beach volleyball.

Despite all the conservative energy devoted to monitoring and critiquing media bias, it may be worse than ever. Why? The answer goes back to Romney’s comment in Jerusalem: the enduring importance of culture.

Imagine if a cadre of journalists were recruited to cover the Obama campaign from 100 devoted Rush Limbaugh listeners living in the 230-mile corridor from Midland to Amarillo, Texas. Imagine they were overwhelmingly traditionalist on hot-button cultural issues and heavily evangelical, owned five firearms each and largely socialized with one another and other conservative Republicans.

They could try their damnedest to be fair to the president whose politics they disdain. Still, their own predilections would inevitably show through.

In the real world, journalists tend to have the opposite of all these qualities, and on top of them are usually self-important and willfully blind to their own biases.

It’s a wonder they aren’t told “shove it” more often.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.