Mccain vs the NYT

McCain campaign savages New York Times
John McCain's White House campaign Monday lashed out at the media and declared the venerable New York Times was "150 percent" behind Democratic hopeful Barack Obama.
McCain senior strategist Steve Schmidt rebuked journalists he said had failed in their duty to submit Obama to intense scrutiny and accused news organizations of hounding McCain's running mate Sarah Palin.

"Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization," said Schmidt on a conference call with reporters.

"It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day attacks the McCain campaign, attacks Senator McCain, attacks Governor Palin, and excuses Senator Obama.

"This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate, which is their prerogative to be, but let's not be dishonest and call it something other than what it is."

"It is an organization that has made a decision to cast aside its journalistic integrity and tradition to advocate for the defeat of one candidate -- in this case, John McCain."

The McCain campaign complaints were reminiscent of comments by the campaign of former Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton, which claimed the media was giving Obama an easy ride and not properly "vetting" his candidacy.

Schmidt's outburst came in specific response to a question about a story in Monday's paper which said McCain campaign manager Rick Davis had lobbied for 30,000 dollars a month for five years to defend mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The two firms were taken under government control earlier this month in the early stages of the economic crisis which has consumed Wall Street and transformed the presidential campaign.

Davis said on the conference call he had been on leave of absence from his company for 18 months, and had not done any lobbying work in the area for up to a year-and-a-half before that.

The McCain campaign also defended Palin over her lack of contact with journalists, saying she had spoken to ABC News and Fox News and would soon do an interview with CBS.

"If anybody ever asked us to make a choice between seeing 60,000 people at a rally ... or spending an hour with a reporter, I don't imagine that we'd have many questions as to what we'd rather do," said Davis.

Anger at the media was not just confined to the ranks of McCain's campaign braintrust on Monday.

At a rally Scranton, Pennsylvania, one woman stood up in the question-and-answer period, and berated journalists, pointed a journalists and accused them of exploiting the pregnancy of Palin's unwed teenaged daughter.

"They need to start doing their job and stop picking on little children because of their age and their pregnancies, shame on you," she shouted, provoking delighted cheers at the rally among the mainly Irish American audience.

The Obama campaign mocked Schmidt's comments as a "laughable screed" and sent journalists a list of 40 "probing" stories the paper had written on the Illinois Senator.

Spokesman Bill Burton said the Times had not done any stories on McCain's role in a 1980s Savings and Loans scandal when he was accused of improperly helping a financier counter regulators.

But it is reviled by conservatives who rail against the perceived liberal bias of the mainstream media.