Ron Paul’s campaign has made a powerful tool out of the meme of the media’s disregard. Paul scores success in media assault

In the campaign to get more attention for his campaign, Ron Paul has scored a win.

The Texas congressman and his legions of vocal supporters turned what they deemed insufficient coverage of his close-second finish at Ames straw poll into a story with legs — and now a whole new set of stories. With a new Gallup poll out this week showing him in third place in the nomination race, Paul is scheduled to appear on “Fox News Sunday” this weekend, and a four-page Time magazine feature on his campaign’s momentum will hit newsstands tomorrow.


Paul’s complaints contributed to Time’s decision to do its first major piece on him this campaign season, said its author, Alex Altman, who blogged about the upcoming piece.

“He performed strongly at Ames,” Altman told POLITICO. “I thought, and my editors think, that he had a valid complaint that he was being overlooked.”

That sort of admission has Paul’s camp crowing.

“Media outlets heard from their readership voicing their displeasure about Ron’s exclusion from their post-Ames coverage,” said top Paul political advisor Jesse Benton. “I think the point has been taken, and they’ve giving Ron some level of the coverage that he deserves.”

Complaining about lack of media coverage is a common theme for trailing candidates, but rarely has one made such effective use of the complaint. Paul’s campaign made a powerful tool out of the meme of the media’s disregard. Ever since Jon Stewart shamed the media last week for ignoring Paul’s second-place finished in Ames and generally treating his campaign like “the 13th floor of a hotel,” Paul’s campaign has hammered the theme in its fundraising appeals, while Paul himself rarely addressed a crowd without mentioning it. A Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism study put some teeth on the complaint: Paul’s gotten less coverage than Donald Trump or Jon Huntsman, who’s way in the back of the polls.

Last weekend, Paul’s campaign cited Stewart’s jokes and the “national media blackout” in its appeal for donations to his 76th birthday “money bomb,” which netted $1.8 million.

But the tide was already turning. Since the straw poll, Paul has enjoyed considerable play on cable news, as well as in local print, radio and TV outlets in Iowa and New Hampshire. Long a fixture on CNBC and Fox Business Network, he has spent even more time than usual on those financial networks, and has also enjoyed the limelight on Fox News and CNN, each twice.

But many of these media hits were, in a way, meta-media hits, beginning with some version of the curiously self-negating question: Is the media ignoring you?

An August 16th interview on Fox News with Megyn Kelly was a case in point.

“Let me start with this because it’s starting to make some more headlines, not your campaign and your candidacy, but the fact that the media is ignoring you. Are they?” she asked.

“Sure, yeah, they are, and we need to ask them why,” Paul replied. “I mean, what are they afraid of? We’re doing well, we’re certainly in the top tier… They don’t want to discuss my views because I think they’re frightened by us challenging the status quo and the establishment.”

A mainstay of the financial channels that feed on his wonky dissections of monetary policy, Paul’s also maintained good relations with cable news hosts like Kelly and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. It’s the Sunday morning talk show set that remains a sore point for Paul insiders, who feel the pundit class is even still keeping him out of the mainstream media narrative.

So the news that Paul would appear on “Fox News Sunday” this weekend was greeted as a special triumph for the campaign, meriting its own press release Wednesday.

Paul’s still not getting nearly as much media attention as Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, but he’s already been mentioned in many more of the horse race stories than he had been. And already, Paul’s complaints about the media’s inattention have begun to fuel a backlash.

Wednesday night, Bill O’Reilly complained that he had invited Paul on his Fox News show, and so far, Paul had not accepted.

“Congressman Ron Paul recently told Megyn Kelly that he’s being ignored by the media. Since Ms. Kelly is part of the media, that was a … pretty interesting statement,” said the Fox News host. “When we heard it though, we immediately invited Ron Paul on the Factor. We don’t want anyone to be ignored. So far he has not accepted our very kind invitation.”

Benton said Paul was campaigning in New Hampshire last week when he was invited, and had a scheduling conflict, but would be happy to go on O’Reilly’s show in the future.

On Thursday, Adam Kokesh, a Paul supporter whose show on Russia Today was just cancelled, began to attack Benton on his Facebook page for declining to make Paul available for an interview.

“There is no ‘media blackout’ on Ron Paul,” he wrote, going on to complain about Benton.