John McCain’s campaign is accusing NBC’s Andrea Mitchell of parroting unsubstantiated claims by Barack Obama’s campaign that McCain “cheated” in Saturday’s presidential forum.
Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, is demanding a meeting with NBC News president Steve Capus to complain about Mitchell’s comments on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” The reporter gave voice to what she described as grumblings from the Obama camp that McCain secretly listened in on the Rev. Rick Warren’s questions to Obama, knowing that Warren planned to pose the same questions to McCain.
“The Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is 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,” Mitchell said. “He seemed so well-prepared.”
That prompted Davis to fire off an angry letter to Capus on Sunday.
“The level of objectivity at NBC News has fallen so low that reporters are now giving voice to unsubstantiated, partisan claims in order to undercut John McCain,” Davis fumed. “Mitchell did what has become a pattern for her of simply repeating Obama campaign talking points.”
During the televised forum broadcast from Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., Warren told viewers that McCain would be in a “cone of silence” during the questioning of Obama. Davis confirmed that “McCain was in a motorcade to the event and then held in a green room with no broadcast feed.”
“Mitchell is repeating, uncritically, a completely unsubstantiated Obama campaign claim that John McCain somehow cheated,” Davis wrote. “Instead of trying to substantiate this blatant falsehood in any way, Andrea Mitchell felt that she needed to repeat it on air to millions.”
Meanwhile, Warren told FOX News Radio that the allegations that McCain heard Obama’s questions ahead of time were “total bogus.”
“Cone of silence is a silly term I used from Maxwell Smart,” Warren said. “We had him a green room in a totally different building. Somebody said there was a monitor in that room, yeah, but it was disconnected at the source. If he’d tried to turn it on, all he’d have gotten was fuzz, because it wasn’t even connected. So the Secret Service picked him up, brought him straight to that room, put him in that building. Somebody is systematically calling up all the media the media and trying to create, I dont know, I guess they didn’t like the format or whatever. ”
FOX News asked the Obama campaign whether it suspected that McCain somehow listened in on the Warren-Obama exchange.
“We as a campaign have not said anything about it, though the McCain folks do seem pretty sensitive on the point,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton. “Obama went. He spoke. We appreciated the opportunity.”
Mitchell could not be reached for comment. Last month, conservatives accused her of bias when she criticized a McCain TV ad that went after Obama for canceling a scheduled visit to a U.S. military hospital in Germany.
“He made time to go to the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops,” the ad said. “Seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.”
“That literally is not true,” Mitchell said on MSNBC. “Obama had no intention of bringing any cameras with him. I was there. I can vouch for that.”
She added: “It just seems inexplicable that this whole thing has been such an issue. But clearly the McCain campaign wants this to be an issue, wants to paint him as someone who’s unfeeling about the troops.”
Topic: McCain Camp Fires at NBC, Insists Candidate Observed ‘Cone of Silence’ (Read 1672 times)