From WND:
President Obama’s presidential campaign focused on “making” the news media cover certain issues while rarely communicating anything to the press unless it was “controlled,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn disclosed to the Dominican government at a videotaped conference.
“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” said Dunn.
“One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters,” said Dunn, referring to Plouffe, who was Obama’s chief campaign manager.
“We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it,” Dunn said.
Continued Dunn: “Whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech, a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to why the campaign was saying it, what the tactic was. … Making the press cover what we were saying.”
And why did they get away with this? Because they had a media loaded with willing accomplices, that’s why.
Also, you need to take this strategy in context with this story to see the true disgustingness of it.
ABC’s Rick Klein and Sara Just report: This is not the easiest week for John McCain to get equal time in the media – not with so many journalists in the Middle East to report on Barack Obama’s trip there. And the New York Times op-ed page isn’t making it any easier.
As first reported by The Drudge Report, Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, submitted an opinion piece to the New York Times last week and the paper has rejected it.
A week earlier, the paper published an op-ed by Obama, about the Democrat’s plans for troop draw-down in Iraq. A few days later, the McCain campaign submitted a column rebutting the Obama piece.
According to McCain campaign staffers, the Times rejected the McCain piece and asked for a rewrite to respond directly to some of the claims in the Obama piece, and include an outline of the Republican’s timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq and conditions for withdrawal.
Now, dear readers, when a paper accepts an unsolicited op-ed from one candidate, then refuses to accept another, there’s no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that the paper has an agenda. Of course, finding reasonable people isn’t always the easiest thing.
The reality of the 2008 election is simple.
The media wanted the “first black President” story so much that it pretty much sugar coated, glossed over, and ignored flaws in his candidacy. Every word he spoke was repeated and reported and every criticism dismissed as racism, sour grapes, or fringe.
That election started with an agenda in the primaries, and as a supporter of Hillary Clinton, I saw it first hand. They demolished her in ways they would never even consider going after Barack Obama, all the time acting as his official mouthpiece and now, as we learn, publishing his press releases as news.
This, my friends, is the mainstream media in 2009.