Meet(ing) The Press

When the top news story of the day is that your campaign has snubbed the traveling press corps; your campaign is not having a good day. The McCain campaign has been under assault over the past day or so because of accessibility issues between their candidate and the national press traveling with McCain.

There is always a two-edged relationship between the President, presidential candidates (their staff) and the press. My colleague at Towson University, Dr. Martha Kumar, describes the dynamic between the candidate and the press as a combination of conflict and cooperation. The press needs the story and the candidate needs the press to deliver his/her message to the American people. The question, of course, is which version of the story actually reaches the eyes and ears of the people: the spin of the campaign or the bias of the reporter / editors.

The accessibility issue is very much at the heart of this story. There are only a few media events in a news cycle and the campaign wants to have as much control as possible over message content. On the other side, the traveling press corps has a limited window of opportunity (time and physical access) to file their stories. The issue of candidate access is even more limited on a bus tour because the press corps travels in a separate bus from the candidate.

In 2000, Karen Hughes was a master of maximizing the availability of press time with George W. Bush while limiting the possibility of negative exposure incidents. Media availabilities were kept to a minimum in favor of one-to-one interviews with local (non-traveling) reporters. The McCain campaign is trying to work out a similar strategy to utilize for the fall campaign.

The problem is that the Democratic Convention is a few weeks away and McCain has got to try to recover his media stature before the lights go on in Denver. McCain simply can not afford to be limited to responding to his own ads attacking Obama for the next three more weeks. My advice: resolve this quickly and allow more access to McCain by the traveling press; after all, it is better to have a happy gaggle of press folks in the bus behind you, instead of 60 angry press people pointing their cameras and microphones in your direction…hoping you slip up.