Here’s where credit needs to be given to Mitt Romney and his brain trust. And seriously, they’ll take what they can get however they get it right now, considering how badly things have been going of late.
“I think we have a system of free press. People are able to provide their own perspective based upon their own beliefs. I think there are some people who are more in my camp, there’s a lot of people who are more in his camp, and I don’t worry about that.”
That was how the GOP presidential nominee answered Jan Crawford of CBS News when asked if he thought the “mainstream media” was “in the tank” for the president.
In this perspective, Romney seems to be standing alone among those on the right, who not only think the media is in the tank, but increasingly have been slamming polling firms whose data haven’t looked the way Republicans would like (which is to say, all polling firms not named Rasmussen).
Something else Romney said in his CBS interview stood out to me as someone who also works in the PR field.
“I don’t think anybody in my business thinks they wouldn’t like to rewrite the stories, and write the media accounts in a way that’s more favorable to them. But I don’t worry about that.”
I think what we’re seeing here is a decently thought-out strategy from the Romney camp. If they really do think the media is in the tank for Obama, the approach can be to slam the media for bias, but it’s not all that likely that anybody in the media is going to rewrite its story, so to speak, basically tweak its coverage, at the point of a figurative bayonet.
Play nice, though, and, well, maybe you get a little further along in what your real aim is, namely, as it was made clear above, get the media to report accounts that are more favorable to the way you’d like things presented.
If that doesn’t happen, you’ve always got Fox News, talk radio, the Wall Street Journal and innumerable blogs that will parrot your talking points.
The day and age of the three broadcast networks, the New York Times and Washington Post codifying the conventional wisdom has long since past. The multiplicity of sources for news and views has reduced those who make the tireless claims of bias in the media into so many Don Quixotes, tilting at windmills.
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Chris Graham
