MoDo voted off the McCain island?
posted at 10:45 am on October 2, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
The schadenfreude quotient of this story
makes it irresistable. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd got
stranded by the McCain campaign in Pittsburgh after the campaign
revoked her credential for the press section of the campaign airplane
in August. They have not reconsidered their position, which provoked
this outrage from Timothy McNulty of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Add
Maureen Dowd, the Pulitzer-winning columnist for the NY Times, to the
list of media types who have fallen out bitterly with John McCain. The
McCain campaign has barred her from flying in the McCain and Palin
press planes, even though major media outlets routinely pay thousands
to the campaigns every day for travel and expenses (and also begs the
question, why didn’t her media colleagues Man Up and get her aboard
anyway?)
It all started when Maureen covered an Aug. 30
McCain-Palin rally in Washington, Pa., then wasn’t let on the McCain
plane afterward, forcing her to overnight at a Pittsburgh airport hotel
while the traveling press went on without her.
McNulty
then says that it’s part of a strategy to protect Sarah Palin from
“someone as adroit and experienced as Maureen.” Really? She wasn’t
adroit enough to keep from falling for an urban legend
about Palin. Dowd wasn’t adroit enough to keep from getting caught
chopping up quotes to distort their meaning, as she did with President
Bush in 2003 — from which bloggers coined the term “dowdify”.
One
suspects that the reason her colleagues didn’t “Man Up” was because
they didn’t care to defend Dowd’s journalistic excesses. McNulty
provides the perfect example of this in Dowd’s own response to her
eviction from Team McCain’s ride:
“It was disappointing because I didn’t think John McCain would ever be as dismissive of the First Amendment as Dick Cheney.”
Does
the First Amendment hinge on Maureen Dowd getting a seat on the McCain
campaign jet? Did we enter a time of tyranny because she has to find
other travel arrangements? Maybe Dowd should start reporting on
Obama’s Truth Squad in Missouri, where a campaign actually is
attempting to intimidate critics into silence through prosecution.
Neither Dowd nor her newspaper seem terribly interested in defending
the First Amendment where it counts.
Reporters are not owed a
spot on the campaign planes. Newspapers don’t have a right to that
seat. They can cover the campaigns by purchasing flights on their own
if they like. Maureen Dowd stopped being a reporter when she started
writing opinion columns, which makes her a strange choice for the Times
under any circumstances, and her column on Palin and dinosaurs should
have disqualified her from the McCain beat anyway, if the Times had any
editorial sense at all.
Enjoy flying coach, Maureen. Try reading the First Amendment between stops.
Hilarious!!