Utne Reader editor in chief David Schimke recently spoke up for the alt press at the Dole Institute of Politics, which has hosted a series of election-related panels this year. Schimke was part of the institute’s latest lively panel, “Media Coverage of Campaign 2008: Magic or Misguided?” Check out video from the media panel here, and browse other Dole Institute videos here.

Unlike most of the electorate, some political reporters are not eager to wake up on November 5 with the longest campaign in history a good night’s sleep behind them. “It's kind of like, this is who I am now,” Andrew Romano, a Newsweek blogger, tells the New Republic. “[S]o the idea of the campaign being over and not doing a politics blog is a little bit like, who am I after this election?”

Politico’s Ben Smith shares Romano’s sentiments. “It's so built into my system, that it's going to be hard to stop,” he tells TNR. “It's really pathological.”

But the tight psychological grip campaigns hold on reporters won’t be missed by all those covering the political beat. After the last presidential campaign, CNN correspondent Candy Crowley tells TNR it took her “a good month to stop waking up in the middle of the night in a panic that I've missed something.” Matt Bai of the New York Times notes that some reporters have been on the trail for nearly a year: “There are guys who went out to the primaries in November, December, and thought they'd be done in February or March, and they just never came home.”

Reporter weariness recently caught the critical eye of the Columbia Journalism Review, who took the New York Times to task for what they deemed an instance of lazy campaign coverage. Questioning the relevance of a Times cover story, CJR warns reporters not to “take out their election fatigue on voters.” Just pen a few more good stories, guys, then you can come home and sleep. . .or just keep blogging.

Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank continues to supply noteworthy information from the campaign trail about Sarah Palin’s evolving relationship with the press. This troubling bit of news comes from a live chat Milbank hosted with readers:

…I have to say the Secret Service is in dangerous territory here. In cooperation with the Palin campaign, they've started preventing reporters from leaving the press section to interview people in the crowd. This is a serious violation of their duty—protecting the protectee—and gets into assisting with the political aspirations of the candidate. It also often makes it impossible for reporters to get into the crowd to question the people who say vulgar things. So they prevent reporters from getting near the people doing the shouting, then claim it's unfounded because the reporters can't get close enough to identify the person.

At Political Animal, Steve Benen asks the natural follow-up question: “Why on earth would an independent journalist play along with these ridiculous rules?”

Dana?

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Image by alex-s, licensed under Creative Commons.

Some nasty sound bites have emerged from McCain-Palin rallies recently. Rally-goers have called Barack Obama a “terrorist,” and one even shouted “Kill him!” But Obama hasn’t been the only object of their fury. The media, too, is taking extreme heat from GOP party faithful. A dispatch from a Palin rally in Florida by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank tells a disturbing story:

. . . Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

It seems the McCain-Palin media wars have reached a new climax, with the ticket's supporters somehow convinced that scrutiny of the candidates is something to get angry about. After all the name-calling, Milbank found a creative way to make himself feel better: He stood outside a rally wearing a sign around his neck reading “mainstream media,” and holding another in his hand saying “I need a hug.” He did get a few hugs, but was also told, “You put your hands on me, you’ll spit your teeth out,” and, “You’ll get a hug if you report accurately, which you don’t.”

While not focused on the scorn being directed at the media, the overall ugly turn of McCain-Palin rallies has become a big story in the news, and one the Democrats are pushing, according to Politico. But Jane Kim, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, says the rally story is being told at the expense of issue-based news—namely, John McCain's new mortgage proposal:

While the increasingly dirty language evident at these rallies should certainly be covered in stride, and while Bill Ayers deserves independent inquiry, any report from the trail should remember that McCain did present a new idea that is supposed to help troubled homeowners, and assess his speeches with that in mind. If he’s talking about the plan in between the “Who is Senator Obama?” lines, it deserves mention. If he’s not, that deserves mention as well.

Image by Matthew Reichbach, licensed under Creative Commons.   

The press finally found something more compelling to cover than Sarah Palin: “It's the economy, stupid,” according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Each week in its news index, PEJ breaks down the storylines that are filling the nation's news holes, and the results can be quite telling. The week of September 15–21 marked the first time since the Democratic National Convention that campaign coverage had been dominated by a story without Palin as its central character. According to PEJ, the economy sprinted to the top of the pack that week, accounting for 43.3 percent of campaign coverage.

But, “the focus on the economy practically came out of the blue,” despite the fact that our financial woes had been brewing for some time, says PEJ. Take a look at campaign coverage for the week of September 8 – 14:

NPR aired a story this week that may offer some explanation. Media consultant Jeff Jarvis tells David Folkenflik that even the media are overwhelmed by the nature of the news these days. “It’s just too big and too complicated, and it requires both too much background and fundamental understanding about economics,” Jarvis said. Folkenflik writes that the media is struggling to keep up with such huge national developments in the midst of a presidential campaign. “The breakneck pace of developments means a lot of news worth knowing receives the briefest burst of attention before being dropped for something hotter.”

Charts courtesy of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a project of the Pew Research Center. "Top Campaign Storylines of the Week, September 15-21," published September 22. "Top Campaign Storylines of the Week, September 8-14," published September 15.

Now that Sarah Palin’s meet-and-greet with the media is almost a distant memory, McCain aides are taking their turn in the ring, and the gloves are off. In the second big McCain-media tussle of the fall campaign, McCain strategist Steve Schmidt unleashed fiery attacks against the New York Times, calling the venerable paper “a pro-Obama advocacy organization” and claiming that “it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization.”

Schmidt's fury was sparked by a story about McCain campaign manager Rick Davis’s ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Times reported that Fannie and Freddie paid Davis almost $2 million while he served as president of an advocacy group the companies formed to fight increased regulation, and that Davis held the position primarily because of his close relationship with John McCain.

Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor, responded to the campaign’s accusations in an email to Politico:

It's our job to ask hard questions, fact-check their statements and their advertising, examine their programs, positions, biographies and advisors. Candidates and their campaign operatives are not always comfortable with that level of scrutiny, but it's what our readers expect and deserve.   

According to Politico, McCain aides also held a conference call encouraging reporters to hit Obama harder. “But,” writes Ben Smith, “the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.” (Are we sensing a pattern here?)

When Politico pressed the campaign about the inaccuracies, they got this response:

One McCain aide, Michael Goldfarb, said Politico was “quibbling with ridiculously small details when the basic things are completely right.”

Another, Brian Rogers, responded more directly:

“You are in the tank,” he e-mailed.

Of course, it is a reporter's job to identify such "small" falsehoods. But, no matter, the media-bashing continues. Until next time. . .

Image by soggydan, licensed under Creative Commons.

There are some ads political campaigns never intend to air themselves, but that doesn’t mean you won’t hear plenty about them. Rather than doling out cash to beam these ads into American living rooms, campaigns route them directly to the online and cable news media to shape the day’s story lines. The ads themselves are the story.

According to Politico’s Jonathan Martin, a look at ads airing nationwide on a Sunday in mid-September illustrates how this messaging strategy works. Martin turned to Evan Tracey from the Campaign Media Analysis Group for the numbers: On one Sunday, Obama aired 1,589 commercials to McCain’s 1,490. But the ads that were being talked about most by journalists—Obama’s ad with a huge '80s-style cell phone painting McCain as out of touch, and McCain’s pack-of-wolves spot depicting sexist attacks on Palin—never aired as paid spots.

Of course, that doesn’t mean these spots didn’t get airtime. As raw material for cable news and online chatter, these sorts of ads are aired by talk shows and posted on websites at no cost to the campaigns. Former Al Gore aide Chris Lehane told Martin, “The ads have become far more provocative and entertaining, making it really hard to ignore them. . . there is such a comprehensive media environment between the traditional media and online media that these pieces get picked up and end up impacting the daily news cycle. Think news cycles within news cycles—like the small hands of a clock turning the bigger hands—and that is how these spots work.”

Another key strategy in the campaigns’ efforts to drive media story lines: Give reporters very little access to the candidates. In a related article about the campaigns’ relationship with the press, Politico contends that the reporters traveling with Obama and McCain have “little impact on the broad campaign narratives and daily story lines that supply most voters with their impressions of the candidates. . . A combination of technology and iron message discipline by heavily centralized campaigns has consigned these reporters—once the storied “boys on the bus”—largely to feeding off the public material available to almost anyone over the Web, with very little interaction with the next president of the United States.”

Is this why we hear so much about lipstick and pigs?

Image by Inside Cable News, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sarah Palin’s performance on ABC last week has been extensively analyzed, but as the only journalist allowed access to the candidate since her announcement, how did Charles Gibson do?

Before the interview, speculation swirled about whether Gibson would go easy on Palin, and pundits and voters from around the country advised him on what to ask. Was he tough enough, too tough, and were your questions answered?

Jack Shafer at Slate gives Gibson high marks: “At every point in the Q&A, Gibson had the right follow-up questions to elicit more from Palin, including after he asked the Bush Doctrine cringe-maker.”

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz liked Gibson’s work, too: “What the ABC newsman conducted yesterday was a serious, professional interview that went right at the heart of what we want and need to know about the governor: Could she be president? Does she understand the nuances of international affairs? Does she have a world view?” (Thanks, TVNewser.)

Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics recaps reader responses as mixed: “Speaking of Gibson, some people thought he was fair, while others said he looked like set out to try and make Palin look bad. More than a few mentioned what they saw as his condescending attitude—a number described Gibson's demeanor in terms of a snobby professor delivering a pop quiz while looking down his nose at his subject.”

The conservative blog Newsbusters has no praise for Gibson: “But there was more than Charlie's sneering condescending tone, looking down over the rim of his glasses like some snobby intellectual that bothered me. Twisting her words into a fabrication feeding the fear of theocracy was utterly insulting.”

The liberal blog Crooks and Liars thinks Gibson did fine: “To his credit, Charlie Gibson actually did a pretty good job of grilling Sarah Palin in her first interview since accepting the Republican nomination.”

My two cents: I was glad to see him push her, but also thought he missed some follow-up questions. One that stuck out: When asked what special insight into Russia Alaska’s proximity to the country gave her, Palin responded that you can actually see Russia from Alaska. Gibson moved on.

Hello? Barack? Are you still out there?

I was a bit skeptical that John McCain would be able to completely steal the media spotlight from Barack Obama last week. But on that account, he hit a home run by giving Sarah Palin the VP nod. (Unfortunately for McCain, she’s doing a pretty good job of stealing the limelight from him, too.)

So what was Barack up to while the country turned their attention away from the Democrats to buzz about teen pregnancy, mommy wars, Republican disdain for the media, and experience versus narrative? After some digging, here’s what I came up with:

Entered enemy territory: Obama appeared on the O’Reilly Factor Thursday night (more of the interview to air this week), and he sent troops into the Republican trenches of St. Paul for the RNC.

Took a swing through Pennsylvania. Obama and Biden attempted to court a state they believe could win them the election.

Asked supporters to help Hurricane Gustav victims.

Told reporters to leave Bristol Palin alone.

Kept mum on Sarah Palin.

Raised $10 million after Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech.

Stood up for community organizers.

Repeated the refrain: “With John McCain, it’s more of the same.”