With this in mind, it appears the McCain campaign is successfully working this strategy, as their complaints concerning biased and excessive media coverage of the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama are finally bearing fruit.
According to a new report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, "For the first time since this general election campaign began in early June, Republican John McCain attracted virtually as much media attention as his Democratic rival last week" (emphasis added, h/t Hot Air):
The virtual dead heat in the race for exposure between the two candidates also marked the first time [McCain's] weekly coverage had even been within 10 percentage points of Obama’s total. Indeed, in the eight weeks since early June when the general election contest began, 79% of the stories have significantly featured Obama, compared with 55% for his Republican rival. [...]
It also came a week after the media engaged in a spasm of introspection, amid a wave of accusations that the media was being unfair to the GOP standard bearer. The third biggest campaign storyline for July 21-27 was the issue of whether the press was biased toward and lavishing too much attention on Obama.
Last week, the McCain campaign also drove the narrative by directly tackling that perception in a controversial ad. It described Obama as “the biggest celebrity in the world” and featured images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton—two tabloid favorites known more for hard-partying lifestyles than any other achievements. [...]
In total, the chain of events set in motion by the celebrity ad accounted for almost one-third of the campaign coverage last week. Hence McCain’s attack advertising strategy, which played off the notion that the press was infatuated with Obama, and blended it with the McCain theme that Obama offered less than meets the eye, drove the media narrative last week.
Imagine that. Read the whole thing.
