US election: McCain accuses media of bias towards Obama
This video has been released by McCain to emphasise how much the media are in the tank for Obama.
It's an extraordinary thing for McCain to have done, especially as the mainstream media are giving him such an easy time of it. There has been no serious examination of the myriad of times in which he has flip-flopped and yet, as Obama goes to Europe, McCain throws a huge hissy fit claiming the media are stacking everything against him.
This has apparently been brought on because McCain wrote an article about Iraq in response to an article Barack Obama had published in the New York Times, and the New York Times refused to publish McCain's rejoinder. This left an enraged McCain with no choice other than to take his article to Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and to claim that the Times rejection was further proof of media bias against him.
You will not be surprised to learn that the New York Times have an entirely different take on these events.
The New York Times said it had not rejected the article, only asked for the senator to rewrite it to "articulate in concrete terms how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq".You see, the real crime the New York Times have committed was to ask McCain to define "in concrete terms" his version of "victory" in Iraq. McCain would have found this impossible to do, so he's stormed off in a huff, claiming that even asking him to define victory is somehow an example of media bias.
Until recently McCain has been happy to define himself as the underdog and has even commented that this is a position that he is happy to occupy.
His latest outburst suggests that this is no longer the case and that he is furious that Obama is proving much more media savvy than himself.
And this is leading him down some desperate roads:
The last time I checked the US army obeyed it's civilian leadership, the civilian in charge did not bow to the leader of the military. The president is the commander in chief and, if he says the mission has changed, then he mission has changed, no matter what Petraeus thinks.McCain's campaign team, in a conference call with reporters, yesterday criticised Obama for acknowledging during a press conference in Amman that he is at odds with the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, over Obama's proposed pull-out of US troops. Obama said Petraeus wanted to retain flexibility but Obama insisted that, as president, he had to take a global view of priorities.
McCain's team said Obama should not presume to know better than the general who had fought a successful war.
I seriously doubt that McCain is arguing for a military command which is more powerful than it's civilian leadership, so I don't see this as being an argument that is useful to him in the long run.
The truth is that McCain, for reasons best known to himself, has chose to campaign as the champion of a dreadfully unpopular war. He recently, rather bizarrely, claimed that success had been achieved in this unpopular war.
The New York Times have merely asked him to define the terms of that success. That's not an unreasonable thing to do.
But McCain is so used to being allowed to peddle false narratives that he sees bias in the New York Times' request. If you are going to claim a victory that no-one else on the planet can see, then you should be able to articulate what you mean when you say "we have succeeded".
McCain can't. So he rails against "bias".
Click title for full article.
UPDATE:
Here's a discussion of just how biased the media is in favour of McCain.
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