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NYT on McCain: tilting at sexual windmills
Posted By katie allison granju
E.J. Dionne explains how the much-derided recent NYT piece derailed legitimate questions about McCain’s interactions with lobbyists by tilting at sexual windmills:
It seems odd, but for John McCain it was a blessing to have the chance to bury questions about his dealings with lobbyists beneath an alleged sex scandal. The prurient part of the story was easy to deny, and voters are sick of sex scandals….
The Times got into trouble largely because of the second paragraph of its Thursday story about the relationship between Vicki Iseman, a telecommunications lobbyist, and McCain, then the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Noting that McCain’s staff was anxious about their relationship in the runup to McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, the Times wrote: “A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself . . .”
A story opening that way was inevitably going to be seen as being about sex, even though the Times had no corroboration of that “romantic” relationship. On Sunday, Clark Hoyt, the Times’ internal critic, observed that editors who claimed otherwise ignored “the scarlet elephant in the room.”
“A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did,” Hoyt wrote. Exactly.
Feb 29th, 2008
