According to Politico, the McCain campaign is up in arms over “partisan” coverage of the presidential campaign. It’s nothing new for candidates to deride their media coverage as partisan or otherwise biased, and here’s what did it this time:

Davis made the request Sunday in a letter that is part of an aggressive effort by McCain to counter news coverage he considers critical…

[NBC News correspondent Andrea] Mitchell reported that some “Obama people” were suggesting “that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared.”

A McCain aide said that is not the case: “Senator McCain was in a motorcade led by the United States Secret Service and held in a green room with no broadcast feed.”

Mitchell made the comment in the context of saying McCain did better, and that the Obama camp was defensive. In response to the campaign’s letter, she pointed out that journalists get criticism from both sides.

While the McCain camp is certainly making more of an issue out of this than there is, Mitchell certainly didn’t seem to be slamming McCain, it is worth our time to take a look at the kind of coverage McCain is receiving. At Riehl World View, the right’s view of the media in this campaign is summed up thusly:

Pity the dumbest of the lot here seems to be the media that either goes along with this garbage out of passion, or lacks the intelligence to grasp what’s going on and point it out.

I agree that much of the media might be playing dumb. I simply disagree that this is where it’s happening. That leads us to Frank Rich, and his column today in the New York Times, which outlines McCain’s coverage quite well:

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” — as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”

Rich also makes a very interesting point about the recent polling stating that voters have “heard too much” about Obama lately.  In contrast to Obama, 40% of Americans feel they’ve “heard too little” about McCain.  So what does present polling data represent?  An electorate saturated with Obama news, certainly not  unexpected given the historic nature of his candidacy and the protracted primary battle, and still somewhat unengaged with McCain.  What does that mean for the McCain campaign?  Bad news.  In a climate heavily favoring Democratic candidates, as-yet undecided voters already have a certain distaste for the Republican party.  John McCain’s news vacuum hasn’t been unique to positive coverage, but has kept to a murmur the level of criticism of the Arizona Senator.   With conventions looming and the home stretch of the race approaching, the McCain campaign may well find itself awash with negative coverage in the coming weeks as media outlets attempt to close the coverage gap and voters become more engaged.  What do most Americans know about John McCain?  His maverick reputation from 2000, his war record, but not much else.  The rest, unfortunately for him, is likely to be bad news, and that doesn’t bode well for November.

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