At campaign events, a fiery Sen. Ted Cruz often proclaims that his campaign has made reporters act "like they lit their hair on fire." That after his presidency "there are going to be a whole lot of reporters and newspaper editors and journalists that have checked themselves into therapy."

He prefaces each jab with the sarcastic phrase "our friends in the media" but then he sometimes does something curious: He knowingly wags his eyebrows at the jumble of reporters in the back of the room — a group that doesn't seem to hate Cruz at all, and with whom Cruz sometimes goes out for drinks or shows up with a box of doughnuts. He's also far more accessible for improptu questions than most candidates, and seems to genuinely enjoy the give and take.


Yes, the candidate who has most built his campaign on maligning the media — loudly confronting debate moderators, complaining of anti-GOP bias — is also one of the most media-friendly. Whereas Hillary Clinton has spent more than 70 days without a single press gaggle, and Marco Rubio's town halls turn into speeches with no questions allowed, Cruz is regularly willing to engage with reporters.

It’s not that anyone thinks he loves the press. But Cruz, whose campaign wins high marks for strategic discipline and execution, seems to intimately understand that he needs the media the same way they need him.

"He’s not buddy buddy with the press, it’s grayer. He bashes the media for political effect, but maintains media relations adequately well and his team is definitely not jerks to us, totally fine professionals,” said the Dallas Morning News' Todd Gillman, who follows the campaign regularly.

Cruz gaggles with reporters nearly every single day on the trail. And if he stops for a few days, and reporters begin to complain, the gaggles start back up. Cruz has held off-the-record drinking nights with reporters. And he knows how to create the media moments in ways that will drive the cycle, if only for a few hours.

On a recent Cruz campaign flight from South Carolina to New Hampshire, the candidate brought back a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts for the press corps, joking about the best ways to eat them before gamely answering some questions.

“Compared to some of the other campaign press corps, I'd say we get a lot of access,” wrote a Cruz beat reporter for a major outlet in an email.

The nearly daily gaggle is something almost all the reporters interviewed for this piece brought up. Cruz, a trained debater, seems to revel in such events even if he ends up filibustering answers so that only three or so questions are asked in the time allotted. Still, the reporters following his campaign regularly appreciate the attention.

“He very much understands the game of politics and that cuts both ways,” said another Cruz reporter for a major news outlet. “On the one hand, externally, it’s very important in Republican politics to bash the press. But from the campaign perspective it’s very important in politics to court the press, to call us by our first names and and to understand what we need and when to make news. The way to think about his interactions with the press is it’s all for political gamesmanship which he has pretty masterfully figured out."

This has been Cruz’s way for years. On Capitol Hill, he’d answer questions from all comers, down to reporters for obscure trade journals who asked him questions in the hallways. He held at least one casual off-the-record drinks sessions with congressional reporters in early 2014. In January of this year, he held off-the-record drinks with the press and that ended up lasting hours.

Cruz seemed to reference those off-the-record drinks in a CNN town hall on Wednesday night.

"If you ask reporters in Washington, off the record, you get them at the bar having a couple drinks and you say, is Hillary going to be indicted? Inevitably the answer they give you, they're going to say, well, it depends on if the Obama White House decides they want to throw her overboard," Cruz said.

Host Anderson Cooper asked Cruz if he would tell him the reporters he's having drinks with. Cruz demurred.

Catherine Frazier, a longtime Cruz aide who is now a campaign spokesperson, connected Cruz's relationship with the media back to Cruz's favorite subject — the Constitution.

“It’s no secret that the media is, by and large, liberal," said Frazier in an email. "Even so, Cruz respects the role of the press — he is a constitutionalist and freedom of press is specifically protected under the Constitution. He makes himself available because he wants people to hear his message."

"He is confident in his policies and can articulate where he stands on any given issue, so answering tough questions is not a problem — candidates who can answer the hard questions give the electorate assurance that their positions are genuine, not just scripted for their own political benefit," she added.

To be sure, other candidates on the trail bash the media and still deal with them. Rubio has raised money from people upset by media reports about his fishing boat, student loan debt and even his fashion choices — casting the media as vultures making personal attacks.

But in the lead-up to the New Hampshire primary, many reporters were complaining that Rubio habitually avoided media gaggles. After his disappointing finish in the New Hampshire primary, he turned course and began having multiple sit down meals with reporters and more frequent gaggles, which helped refute the perception, created by his performance in ABC's New Hampshire debate, that he was “robotic.” (The Rubio campaign declined to comment).

Jeb Bush regularly holds media gaggles, playfully toying with reporters, calling them "my people" and awkwardly joking about confusing their names when he's not wearing glasses. Donald Trump is perhaps the most hostile toward the media, calling out reporters and outlets from the stump and on Twitter for perceived slights, barring specific reporters from his events and even skipping debates because he doesn’t agree with how an outlet treated him. On the other hand, Trump does more one-on-one interviews than most candidates. John Kasich is very open with the press, as well, but he rarely attacks the media with the same fervor as Trump or even Rubio.

But none take on the media like Cruz, who often highlights the national press corps as a monolith that's seeking to take him down. When The Washington Post published — and then retracted — a cartoon featuring Cruz's two daughters as organ-grinder monkeys after he featured them in a campaign ad, the Cruz campaign sent out an email saying it shows “exactly how desperate the liberal media is to attack and destroy me.”

After The New York Times published an article about his failure to disclose millions of dollars in loans he received during his Senate campaign, Cruz parlayed the story into a call for “emergency donations” over the liberal media’s attempt to "discredit and destroy” his candidacy.

The Cruz campaign also understands timing, creating media moments as a way to grab the media cycle, if only for a few hours. On Wednesday, he staged a surprise press conference in South Carolina, replete with props including poster boards detailing all of Trump’s donations to Democrats. The event was carried in its entirety on CNN, and political Twitter was, for a few moments, overtaken by his statements as he bashed Trump and Rubio.

"You build your case. You in the media have to be fed. So part of this is a deliberative strategy" said Chad Sweet, the Cruz campaign chairman, when asked in the Iowa debate spin room why the campaign didn’t start attacking Trump earlier in the election cycle. "To get into every news cycle, if you put all your ammunition out at once, you're going to end up not having the ability to continue to command the spotlight of the media.”