After an opening teaser about the new McCain Paris Hilton attack ad, I thought, finally! a network will do a story on the unprecedented negativity of the McCain campaign (e.g. basically calling Obama a traitor recently). But no, on the NBC Nightly News tonight Brian Williams, Kelly O'Donnell and Chuck Todd tried to treat it all as business as usual and that both sides are equally guilty.
They made no mention of the virtually unprecedented negativity of the McCain campaign of late and are trying to create a narrative that both sides are doing the same thing and it's just the way politics is done. They apparently have such a fear of alienating the McCain side that any story has to treat McCain in an absolutely equal way as Obama. It's impossible that one side is just plain wrong and doesn't deserve that good treatment.
Brian starts out by saying:
"We have 98 days to go until the presidential election.. That means 98 days worth of promises from both candidates to keep the debate lofty and civil. And while they may say that, it's just as likely that BOTH campaigns will keep putting TV ads on the air tearing each other apart. The latest ad to do that comes from the McCain campaign."
Then they go to Kelly O'Donnell, who is the correspondent who covers the McCain campaign, to do the supposedly neutral story. Of course though she can't do anything to piss off McCain, or she'd be kicked off the "straight talk express".
Kelly presents the whole thing as business as usual, stating "What's known as defining the opponent is a critical phase in any presidential campaign and that was unmistakable today as John McCain tried to define
Barrack Obama by mocking a perceived strength – his popularity."
Then they show McCain's Paris Hilton ad. Next they show Obama responding with his line today about how you should ask McCain about what he's for, not just what he's against. And also said that Obama issued a memo playing off a Britney Spears song "Oops, he did it again." [Come on Obama campaign, you've got to make better responses than these.]
O"Donnell then states that McCain's campaign asserts Obama was the first to run a negative spot hitting McCain on TV 3 weeks ago "On gas prices, John McCain is part of the problem."
Then comes some real positive stuff for McCain – today he called himself a "maverick" and made an appeal to independents. Here they show a decent sized clip of McCain basically saying "I work for you and the country we love", among other things.
She concluded by saying Obama has put together an ad that may begin running tonight saying that McCain has been negative and even at times false in his attacks.
Then Chuck Todd comes on, saying that they want to paint Obama as a bicoastal elitist. The goal is to get the working class voters in the key industrial states to say "I'm not for some international superstar, I'm for John McCain." Chuck said nothing about the inappropriateness of many of McCain's ads lately – a major issue that has not been covered by NBC. And he went out of his way to repeat in different colorful ways the bicoastal elitist idea.