Just How New Is This 'War on the Media' Tack?

Last night Mike Huckabee thanked the “elite media” for unifying the Republican Party behind the McCain-Palin ticket.

“I wasn’t sure it could be done,” he said, drawing happy laughter from the crowd.

There were "boos" directed at the press stand last night, and a few more attacks before it was time to file. The media were sitting right there, in plain view, half of them in a section to the immediate right of the stage and all the rest on the left. Arranged by affiliation, they sat quietly in their assigned seats, typing on their laptops with their little hands. The New York Times reporters sat in one row, The Washington Post in another, and so forth; instead of individual desks, each of these was equipped with a long, black surface that resembled nothing so much as a trough.

Mr. Huckabee went on as if they weren’t in the room. “The reporting of the past few days,” he said, referring implicitly to the coverage of McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin, “has proven tackier than a costume change at a Madonna concert.”

The people who had done that reporting dutifully wrote down every word. “Tacky” was a new one. In fact, it was just about the nicest thing anyone affiliated with the McCain campaign had said about their old friends in the media all week, as they waged what many say is the most focused assault on the press that a presidential campaign has ever mounted.

“In a way it seemed like a bit of a setup,” said New York Times media columnist David Carr in an interview this morning. “They ran a convention that was absolutely free of news and star power for two days and they left the press at loose ends. They can say that our coverage is untoward and over the top, but what alternative did they offer?”

The word around the media center all week was that Ms. Palin was holed up somewhere working on her speech, pointedly ignoring all the unpleasant bits of trivia that reporters were digging up in the wake of her emergence last Friday. Campaign operatives, meanwhile, worked energetically to cast Ms. Palin as a woman being bullied and smeared by left-wing reporters who were trying, out of bloodthirsty partisanship, to destroy her.

This kept up until last night, at which point Ms. Palin got aggressive.

“I've learned quickly, these past few days, that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone,” she said about halfway through her speech. The crowd, at this point safely in her pocket, went nuts, and members of the Alaska delegation began chanting, inexplicably, “NBC! NBC! NBC!” A sound man from the network who was standing nearby froze in his place, as if playing dead in hopes of avoiding detection.

“Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators,” Ms. Palin went on, the contempt in her voice chilling. “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion. I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this great country.”

A man on the floor noticed a camera crew from Inside Edition who were in the process of taping and spiritedly jumped into the frame, shouting exuberantly as he did so. Before the interruption, the on-air guy had been telling the folks back home about how great Ms. Palin’s speech was going.

When it was all over, a young woman with a “Lawyers for McCain” button pinned to her lapel made her way out of the arena with a friend and looked around at the hundreds and hundreds of people around her who were trying to do the same. “I feel like having so many reporters here is not good,” she said. “Too much press.”

It turned out this morning that it actually was good, because after the convention adjourned last night all those reporters wrote stories proclaiming Ms. Palin’s speech an unqualified, devastating success.

None of them, it seemed, had taken offense at all those things that were said about them from the podium. And why should they, reporters and editors told the Media Mob today. This is how it’s been forever.

“I didn’t take it personally,” said Lee Horwich, the assignments editor at the Washington bureau of USA Today. “Campaigns are inevitably hostile. They want their point of view represented and anything negative about them minimized, and that’s true of every campaign.”