Any effort to explain media bias in favor or against any of the presidential candidates should really start with an examination of why, exactly, the Establishment press corp developed such a gargantuan man-crush on John McCain in 2000. I don’t know if I can provide a precise answer to that question. Part of it was that the press corp was, at that time, largely made up of men who had avoided military service in Vietnam. They seemed to get some kind of vicarious thrill out of McCain, who they constantly heralded as a ‘hero,’ even though his military service and career were the furthest thing from heroic. No one could dispute that McCain had suffered terribly while serving the country, and that was fetishized by a group of men who hadn’t suffered at all. So, that was the starting point. McCain was a real man. Bush and Gore were spoiled brats who only got where they were because of their daddies.
But admiration for McCain and a certain sense of personal inadequacy only goes so far in explaining why the press corp fawned all over the senator from Arizona. Just as important, John McCain made himself extremely accessible. He traveled around in his Straight Talk Express bus and mingled freely with the reporters. He told bawdy jokes. He provided good quotes. He helped the reporters meet their deadlines and keep their editors happy. And he fed them well. He acted as if he liked the people covering his campaign, and maybe he did. The result was that reporters largely forgot that John McCain, too, only got where he was because of his daddy. They forgot that he had been even more of a spoiled brat than Gore and Bush before he wound up in the Hanoi Hilton. They didn’t talk about how many planes he had destroyed. They didn’t dwell on how close he came to being expelled from the Naval Academy or how he graduated near the bottom of his class. They didn’t talk about how he ditched his wife after she was disfigured in a car accident. They turned his ethical lapses in the Keating 5 scandal into a virtue that had launched his principled crusade to redeem himself.
To summarize, the press saw in McCain someone who embodied the courage they lacked, who suffered while they were comfortable. They saw him as absurdly virtuous, which he was not. And they liked him. They were drawn to his personality and appreciated that McCain treated them well and made their jobs easier.
In other words, there really wasn’t much of an ideological bias. Reporters didn’t like McCain because he was more or less conservative than Bush or Gore. They did like that he occasionally criticized his own party or took an unorthodox stand, but mainly because it allowed them to cast McCain as a “maverick.” McCain’s main asset with the press was his personal biography and his friendly and respectful accessibility.
Compare that to Mitt Romney’s personal biography and his unfriendly, truculent inaccessibility. If you want to know why today’s press corp isn’t too keen on Mitt Romney, you don’t have to go as far as Joe Trippi. Yes, the press wants the contest to continue and they want to have some excitement, but the press isn’t just engaging in sensationalism.
A bias that favors sensationalism is a bias that by definition favors Gingrich, who is sensational in every sense of the word. The kind way of describing this is to say that Newt is recognizably human: He is, as BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith puts it, “a flawed, interesting man with a story that includes success and failure.” A more colorful way is offered by the National Review’s Jim Geraghty: “He’s Rex Ryan, with an enormous ‘Can you believe what this guy said?’ factor in every appearance.” Or, perhaps even more apt, Gingrich is a candidate forever on the verge of spontaneous human combustion—and what reporter in his right mind would want to drive a guy like that out of the race any sooner than necessary?
Trippi comes closer to the truth when he talks about Romney.
Most plainly, there is the media’s antipathy to the kind of disciplined, unspontaneous, inaccessible campaign that Romney is running. Also to the fact that, hey, let’s face it, he’s not exactly a Roman candle of a candidate. Then there is the temperamental gorge that separates him from most journalists. “Reporters are the kids in the back of the classroom, throwing spitballs,” says Lewis. “McCain would be sitting back there, too, saying, ‘I’m not listening to this B.S.,’ and so would Gingrich. Romney is the guy sitting up in front, raising his hand to every question. Reporters listen to Arcade Fire; Romney listens to the Carpenters and Donny and Marie.”
The suspicion of Romney is even deeper than that, however. Ever since his run in 2008, when his contortions on various issues earned him his reputation as an inveterate flip-flopper, the members of the media—and his rivals, then and today—have regarded him as a phony, his candidacy based on, as Smith puts it, “some really brittle half-truths about his consistency.” But now there is a creeping sense that he may be something worse; that on a range of issues, notably his finances, Romney is making claims that may be less than fully truthful.
But, again, it’s not that Romney is a liar. Newt Gingrich may be the most accomplished liar in the entire country. Romney’s bigger problem is that he treats reporters as the enemy, denies them access, probably doesn’t feed them all that well, and doesn’t make their jobs easier. On top of that, the press corp can’t relate to his personal biography. They may have skipped the Vietnam War, but they didn’t do it knocking on doors in France as a Mormon missionary. They may admire personal wealth, but not really so much when the fortune is made as a vulture capitalist. And Romney doesn’t tell any bawdy jokes.
The press may be pulling for Gingrich to stay in the race and do lasting damage to Romney, but it’s not because they like Gingrich or strictly because they want to sell papers or get page-views. They just don’t like Mitt. He’s given them no reason to like him.
