Romney's press conference Wednesday fueled anti-media fires. Mitt's blame-stream media problem

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the Republican playbook: In times of political crisis, blame the liberal mainstream media.

Whether justified or not — and it varies — attacks against the press have served as a conservative defense mechanism for decades: from George H.W. Bush’s “Annoy the media!” bumper sticker in 1992 to Sarah Palin’s criticisms of the “liberal lamestream media” in 2008 to the billboards and advertisements around the country this year that read, “Don’t believe the liberal media!”


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But in an election season in which leading conservative voices have often led the charge in faulting their candidate, Republican Mitt Romney, over his campaign strategy, his penchant for secrecy and the vagueness of his policy platforms, “blame the liberal media” has become a problematic rallying cry. Traditionally, conservatives have locked arms and defended the standard-bearer when he’s on his heels — but since Romney emerged as the presumptive nominee, there has been a pervasive feeling among establishmentarians and right-wing pundits alike that Romney is not their man.

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board slammed Romney for being too vague on his health care policy proposals. The Weekly Standards’ Bill Kristol knocked the candidate for running a “pre-Ryan sort of campaign” comparable to that of Michael Dukakis in 1988. Radio show host Laura Ingraham chastised Republicans for losing what should be a “gimme” election and said the party should be “shut down” if Romney doesn’t beat President Barack Obama. Rush Limbaugh suggested that the party was insufficiently conservative. And this was just the latest round in the ongoing criticism Romney has had to face from his own side over the last year.

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In that context, it is difficult to see how this past week’s rallying cry against the “liberal mainstream media” — over the media’s coverage of Romney’s criticism of the president’s foreign policy and of Obama himself — lasts beyond the current news cycle. The ambition of such attacks has always been to deflect criticism against the right and demonize a coalition of opposition on the left. But even leading conservative voices who leveled criticisms against the political press this week caution against relying on a Palin-style anti-media effort.

Kristol wrote Wednesday that Romney was “right to reject the counsel of the mainstream media, which is to keep quiet and give President Obama a pass” and told POLITICO that the media does have a liberal bias. “There is a ‘gotcha’ culture, and they’re happier to play ‘gotcha’ with Republicans than with Democrats,” he said.

But Kristol also said it’s “always a mistake” to rely on anti-media attacks to make an argument. “I have a sentence about the media in my piece, which is really about foreign policy, but it shouldn’t be the consensus of conservatives in general to blame the media,” he said.

John Podhoretz, who wrote a searing attack on the media’s criticism of Romney in the New York Post on Thursday, made a similar argument: “Blaming the media can be a crutch, and Romney is open to all kinds of criticism, but this was a unanimity of opinion from a press corps that votes 90 percent Democrat,” he told POLITICO. “At this point, the referees are the fans: These are people who have the same opinion about things, their positions harden and grow and solidify, and it becomes the consensus.”

In defining “the media,” Podhoretz made the point of distinguishing the opinions of liberal and conservative pundits, such as himself, from a mainstream consensus defined, as he puts it, by “CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, POLITICO and The Associated Press.”

“If Josh Marshall wants to proselytize over at Talking Points Memo, that’s fine. Anyone can write whatever they want,” Podhoretz said. “My problem is when guys like Mark Halperin [of Time magazine], John King [of CNN], Mark Murray and Chuck Todd [both of NBC] simply pick up that ball and run with it.”

Indeed, the notion that Romney had made a poor political calculation in blasting Obama after the attacks in Cairo and Libya became the consensus Wednesday. On his blog, Halperin wrote that “the Gang of 500” — the political insiders and reporters who drive the daily media cycle — was likely to see Romney’s attack against Obama “as one of the most craven and ill-advised tactical moves in this entire campaign.” The observation — one of those frequent instances in which personal analysis is attributed to the “conventional wisdom” — echoed across social media and, in fact, became the conventional wisdom.

“The press really took the ball up on that and ran with the Obama administration — there was a herding, flocking and schooling behavior,” Rick Wilson, a Republican media strategist, told POLITICO. “They all run to the sound of the bell ringing, slicing of the onion thinner and thinner on how Romney handled this as opposed to actually addressing the important question at hand: Is the Middle East about to blow up and turn into a river of blood?”

If the “Gang of 500” was quick to come to the consensus that Romney had blown his response to the attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities, the right was just as quick to go looking for evidence of a media conspiracy.

Within hours, the conservative blog Right Scoop posted video of CBS’s Jan Crawford and NPR’s Ari Shapiro on a hot mic, discussing the questions they would ask Romney regarding his attack on Obama — as if two reporters working to make sure their question would get answered was evidence of some grand plot to ruin the GOP candidate. The video got picked up by the Drudge Report, and on Fox & Friends on Thursday, conservative writer Michelle Malkin called the two journalists “tools” and “stenographers” of Obama and said their dialogue underlined “the obituary of mainstream objective news.”

Meanwhile, many of the same voices that had been lobbing hand grenades at Romney — Kristol, Ingraham, National Review editor Rich Lowry, the Journal and Limbaugh — circled the wagons and rallied to Romney’s defense.

In The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, the editorial board wrote that Romney’s “political faux pas was to offend a pundit class that wants to cede the foreign policy debate to Mr. Obama without thinking seriously about the trouble for America that is building in the world.”

In his column for POLITICO, Lowry argued, “For the press, politics doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. It stops wherever is most convenient for Obama’s reelection campaign.”

Over at Red State, conservative blogger and CNN contributor Erick Erickson said the media “beclowned itself” by focusing exclusively on Romney’s statement while ignoring major developments out of North Africa and the State Department.

Podhoretz made a similar argument when he pointed out in his own column for the Post that after complaining about Romney’s decision to “politicize” the violence overseas by attacking Obama, no one in the press called out the president for swiping at Romney in an interview with CBS News that aired the same day at 4 p.m.

Asked about Obama’s decision to attack Romney on the same day his own campaign had discouraged such a move, White House spokesperson Joshua Earnest accused POLITICO of trying to “drum up some criticism.”

The anti-media line of attack now has been taken up by the Romney campaign, where staffers are echoing the lines from supportive editorials: “I love all these reporters saying that they thought the Democratic convention was better,” one senior adviser told BuzzFeed. “Of course they did. It’s like a steak lover saying they like a steakhouse. They served what 90 percent of reporters love. And they liked it? Shocking.”

But Republican strategist Steve Schmidt cautions against relying too heavily on the anti-media crutch.

“Every single presidential campaign — Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush — has to navigate this issue of bias with the media, and the first rule of navigating it is to understand that not every criticism is evidence of media bias,” Schmidt, the chief strategist for John McCain’s 2008 campaign, told POLITICO. “This is just part of the scrutiny that comes with running for president: Every day is playoff football, and you can’t always make the claim that the coverage is through the prism of bias.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who in a departure from some of her fellow conservatives criticized Romney’s handling of last week’s foreign policy situation — “he looked weak,” she said on Fox News — said charges of media bias were legitimate but indicated trouble for Romney’s campaign.

“Mainstream media is stacked toward Democrats and against Republicans, toward liberalism and against conservatism. That is the way it is, and winning Republicans have to break through the prism with the force of their thoughts, their philosophy, their words and persona,” she said. “It’s hard: When it’s working, they know they have a guy so strong he broke the prism. When it’s not, they are angry at the prism. Their anger is legitimate and deserved, but it’s also a sign of unease.”