Ron Paul's lone national TV interview this week was a Friday chat with Bloomberg. In a switch, Paul ignores the media

SIOUX CENTER, Iowa — Neglect by the mainstream media is so central to Ron Paul’s identity that his campaign uses it to raise money. But as his surging poll numbers in Iowa have drawn scrutiny to his incendiary newsletters, reporters are complaining that Paul is now the one ignoring the mainstream media.

It’s been hard to turn on cable TV lately without catching an interview with one of his competitors, yet Paul himself has been noticeably absent.


Until booking a Friday night interview with Bloomberg TV, he had not done a single national media interview all week — a sudden drop-off that followed a string of testy interviews last week, during which CNN and Fox reporters probed him on his knowledge of the decades-old newsletters’ content. During one exchange, he appeared so frustrated with questioning by CNN’s Gloria Borger that he removed his microphone and walked away. His campaign contends the interview was simply over.

Meanwhile, national reporters on the Paul beat are grumbling that the candidate almost never takes their questions at events anymore and has done only one press “avail” since August — and that ended abruptly after two minutes last week when someone asked about the newsletters.

The tightened access to reporters is fairly typical for a candidate near the top of the polls bearing down on voting day. But in a half-dozen interviews with reporters assigned to follow Paul on the trail, journalists expressed frustration about how inaccessible Paul had become — particularly after his campaign’s loud complaints this summer about not getting covered.

“They’ve been sending out fundraising letters saying, ‘We don’t get enough coverage,’ but they don’t do media avails, and a lot of us reporters are frustrated,” said one Paul beat reporter who asked not to be named because the reporter didn’t have permission to talk to the press. “He had been answering reporter questions on his way out the door, but since he has been back from Christmas, on Wednesday, he hasn’t even been doing that.”

Paul campaign Chairman Jesse Benton denies that the campaign is dodging tough questions, pointing out that nearly half of the weeklong stretch without national media interviews was taken up by the holidays.

“We have had many requests, but Dr. Paul’s priority has been spending time with his family over Christmas and talking to Iowa and New Hampshire voters and press,” Benton said.

That stretch will end on Friday night, when he will sit down with “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” and more definitively on Sunday, when he will perform a hat trick by appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” ABC’s “This Week” and CNN’s “State of the Union.”

But campaign reporters are unlikely to get many more opportunities to ask questions. Paul will tape his appearances on these shows from his home in Texas, where he will be spending the weekend away from the campaign trail before the Tuesday caucuses.

Paul traditionally has been open with reporters, and he has been a cable mainstay through much of the fall after his second-place finish in the Ames Straw Poll — and subsequent media blackout — became a news story in itself.

More often than not, though, stories filed from Iowa this week mentioned that Paul took no questions from reporters — or declined to answer those that were asked.

“What he does not want is any questions from the scores of reporters who line the edges of the room,” POLITICO’s Roger Simon wrote in a Thursday dispatch from Newton, Iowa. “Paul declines to respond to rivals’ sharp criticism,” blared a CNN headline.

At a stop in a community center in Atlantic, Iowa, on Thursday, Paul arrived right on time, delivered his stump speech and did his best to ignore the two dozen reporters who surrounded him.

When a man with a sheaf of papers tried to work his way toward Paul, a security guard stood in his way. “Are you with the media?” he asked. “No, no,” the man assured him. The security guard stepped aside and helped the man orient himself so that Paul could give the supporter an autograph.

Friday was little different, with Paul brushing off reporters’ questions as he left his first event.

Benton said the restrictions on press availability are a response to the presence of so-called network campaign embeds on the trail — usually young reporters assigned to watch the candidate like a hawk in case something newsworthy happens.

“They follow you around. They never make any news about your event. They are there to ask loaded questions and catch a candidate at a loose moment, to see if the candidate trips or gaffes or throws up. It’s really very unhelpful. So we have stopped doing come-one, come-all avails, because they get in the way and crowd out the local reporters,” he said.

And questions at events have been restricted simply because of the crush of media that comes from being a real contender, Benton said.

“As far as the last five days, we’ve had 50 media surrounding us and 30 cameras, and we’ve got 20 people yelling questions at Ron. That’s just an untenable situation. There’s absolutely no way he can respond to that, so he just smiles and walks through the crowd,” Benton said.

From the podium, Paul often shares his bemusement at suddenly becoming a hot media commodity. “There does seem to be more cameras than there used to be,” he told an audience in Newton on Wednesday.

Still, he clings to his identity as a media underdog. Talking to an audience at a convention center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Thursday night, he blasted the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act before quipping, “And I’m sure you’re not hearing it from the evening news!” — a jab at the mainstream media that drew some of his biggest cheers of the night.

Indeed, Paul’s campaign and legions of tech-savvy followers have enjoyed some of their greatest success when playing the role of media refs, as they did after Paul’s strong Ames Straw Poll finish. They flooded reporters’ inboxes with complaints about being shut out of coverage, charging reporters with bias. The outcry itself was covered — here and elsewhere — and even earned Paul a sympathetic segment on “The Daily Show.”

For a campaign and supporter base that already feel that the mainstream media is against them, the return of the newsletter story seems like another example to add to the pile.

“The status quo represents revenue to the big media companies, and Ron Paul is a threat to the status quo,” said Dave Wilcox, a 50-year-old self-employed defense contractor who drove from Tampa to Iowa to help Paul win the caucuses. “And with uncertainty comes fear.”

Wilcox included Fox News, which typically discounts Paul because of his noninterventionist foreign policy, in the media elite he criticized. He said he knows many Paul supporters who tried to get even after Bill O’Reilly recently criticized Paul by going to Amazon.com and giving a one-star rating to O’Reilly’s books.

In more than a dozen interviews about media coverage, Paul supporters in Iowa said talk about the newsletters is fair game but agreed the matter was addressed years ago.

“Before, they just ignored him,” said Mike Jensen, 31, of Lewis, Iowa, who supported Paul four years ago as well. “Now, it seems like they have to run him into the dirt.”

“It’s completely pulled out of the archives for no apparent reason other than Ron Paul has gotten popular — that’s it,” said Adam Kokesh, a libertarian talk radio host, Iraq War veteran and Paul supporter. “It’s been raised and [was] settled in the last presidential cycle.”

Indeed, the story of the Paul newsletters looks like a textbook case of the media’s tendency to vet only winners.

The newsletters, written under various titles such as “Ron Paul’s Freedom Report” and “The Ron Paul Survival Report,” were published in the 1980s and ’90s. But they didn’t become a news story until Paul’s 1996 opponent, Charles “Lefty” Morris, released some incendiary excerpts including, “If you have very been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.” At the time, Paul’s campaign responded by saying he had been quoted out of context.

Later, Paul said he did not write the passages, and the story mostly died until the 2008 campaign, when New Republic writer Jamie Kirchick tracked down copies of the newsletters and published a tough exposé titled, “Angry White Man: The bigoted past of Ron Paul.” Kirchick charged that the newsletters contained not just racist writing but the kind of anti-government paranoia that fed the militia movement.

Benton told Kirchick that Paul had not read the incendiary passages. David Weigel and Julian Sanchez, writing for Reason Magazine at the time, followed up with a report postulating that the newsletters had likely been written by Lew Rockwell, Paul’s former congressional chief of staff and vice president of the company that published the newsletters.

But because Paul was not nearly as successful of a candidate as he seems poised to be this time, the newsletter story petered out in the mainstream press.

Curiously, the story has not been part of the 2012 campaign at all until it reemerged during the past few weeks, when polling showed that a Paul win in Iowa is a real possibility. The Weekly Standard published a reminder piece by Kirchick this month, cable news weighed in and The New York Times published a front-page story Monday drawing from the three-year-old Reason piece.

As the story gained steam last week, Paul — who had been on a stretch of prominent national media hits, including a softball interview with Jay Leno — suddenly found himself confronted with questions about the newsletters during every interview.

Even Neil Cavuto, who frequently has Paul on his Fox News show, pressed Paul on his newsletters.

Paul has repeated that he doesn’t know who wrote the newsletters, didn’t read the incendiary parts and disavows their content. And lately, he has added that he regrets being “negligent” as a publisher. But interviewer after interviewer — both friendly and less so — find his claims of ignorance hard to believe, particularly when he doesn’t seem interested in revealing, or even getting to the bottom of, who actually wrote them.

His treatment of the topic has cost him at least one influential supporter. Andrew Sullivan, the self-described conservative blogger, withdrew his endorsement of Paul this week because of the candidate’s refusal to take sufficient responsibility for his newsletters.

And Kokesh, who argues that whatever Paul is being accused of pales in comparison to the serious policy flip-flops of his opponents, still wishes there were more answers.

“I wish that whoever wrote those statements would come forward to clear Ron Paul’s name,” he said.

James Hohmann reported from Iowa; Keach Hagey reported from Arlington, Va.