McCain's Easy Ride

From the TelegraphUK.....

Senator John McCain has been getting an easy ride from the media despite a series of mistakes and confused policy statements by the Republican candidate on the campaign trail, critics claim.

By Alex Spillius in Washington
Last Updated: 12:48AM BST 20 Aug 2008

The Arizona senator has regularly muddled the names of countries or the sequence of important overseas events, and has contradicted himself on important issues.

But his blunders have very largely gone unreported by the main US television channels and in leading newspapers, with CBS even facing strong claims that it edited out an incorrect McCain response to a question on Iraq during an interview with its star presenter Katie Couric.

Prominent columnists and bloggers, as well as Democrats, are now asking if Mr McCain's cordial relations with the press - fostered by years of easy access and long press conferences - could make a real difference in his battle for the White House with Senator Barack Obama.

Despite the Republican's warranted complaints that he receives much less coverage his younger rival, who is attempting to become the first black US president, critics argue that Mr McCain is better off with fewer reports, if that means his errors are ignored.

Mr McCain, who is 72 on Aug 29, has yet to make a slip-up on the scale of Gerald Ford's suggestion in 1976 that Poland was not part of the Soviet bloc, or George W Bush's statement in 2000 that Pakistan's Gen Pervez Musharraf was an elected leader. But he has come close.

He has erroneously claimed that Iran was training al-Qaeda in Iraq, and that the "surge" of US troops came before the Sep 2006 Sunni Awakening in Anbar province. He has several times referred to Czechoslovakia, a country that divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia 15 years ago.

Launching an initiative for the US to be energy-independent called the Lexington Project, named after the town "where Americans asserted their independence", he stumbled over the word Lexington, often saying "Lexeegton".

He also paused for eight seconds when asked whether it was right that medical insurance companies paid for Viagra and not the female contraceptive pill, before giving an evasive answer.

Having promised not to raise taxes in early July, within weeks Mr McCain said that "all options were on the table" for reform of the underfunded Social Security system, the equivalent of National Insurance. By definition that would include increases in income tax.

Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist, wrote that many papers "give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows".

Josh Marshall, writing on the influential Talking Points Memo blog, said that McCain's mistakes would "for any other politician who didn't have the benefit of years of friendship or acquaintance with many of the reporters covering him... be a major topic of debate in the campaign".

The occasional loose remarks by Mr Obama has in contrast led to a media feeding frenzy, his supporters claim.

Dan Gerstein, a Democrat strategist, said: "If Obama had been making these kinds of mistakes it would have been front page news. It's pretty clear the press is skittish about reporting the age thing, and I think an element of pity comes into play."