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This "access" whinefest by the media, which has been going on for the better part of the week, isn't legitimate and isn't about their ability to practice journalism.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. Howard Kurtz and his panel this Sunday, which included David Zurawik, Julie Mason and Bill Plante come across as still being pissed off that none of them had a chance to snap a picture of President Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods.

As Kevin Drum said, it would be easier to sympathize with these national reporters if they really did ask tough, unpredictable questions of the President, but they don't. And Drum's observations on the Politico article and their complaints about the White House using social media and going around the press, can be applied to the conversation here as well:

At the same time, the reporters interviewed for this piece seem to be weirdly upset over the fact that the Obama White House uses Twitter and Facebook and releases lots of its own photos. Why is this a problem? It's 2013, guys. Why shouldn't a president communicate with the public using whatever mediums the public happens to consume? Over the past century, that's evolved from whistle-stop tours to radio to TV to Facebook, but so what? Why should reporters be unhappy about this?

Given the sorry state of our corporate media these days, I don't think they're going to get much sympathy from most of the public.

Transcript below the fold.

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TPM caught this exchange earlier in the audio podcast but it's since gone up at YouTube (full version here). I've excerpted the bit on Politico.

via David Taintor at Talking Points Memo

New York Times polling guru Nate Silver took aim at Politico’s brand of reporting on Friday, saying the Washington-based news outlet covers politics like sports but “not in an intelligent way at all.”

Reflecting on Politico’s pre-election criticism of his FiveThirtyEight model, Silver told Grantland’s Bill Simmons on his “B.S. Report” podcast:

What was remarkable to me is that you had some, like, journalist for, um, Politico, or something … who, like, tweeted … ‘All Nate’s doing is averaging polls and counting electoral votes?’ … ‘That’s the secret sauce?’ It’s like, well, yeah, and the fact that you can’t comprehend that very basic thing … that says more about you than, than about me, right?”

The tweet Silver is referring to came from Politico’s Jonathan Martin, and actually reads: “Avert your gaze, liberals: Nate Silver admits he’s simply averaging public polls and there is no secret sauce.” Martin linked to a piece by his Politico colleague Dylan Byers, who wrote the definitive piece of Silver skepticism during the 2012 cycle. In the piece — headlined “Nate Silver: One-term celebrity?” — Byers considered the possibility of Silver’s star power dimming if Mitt Romney became president.

Avert your gaze, liberals: Nate Silver admits he's simply averaging public polls and there is no secret saucepolitico.com/blogs/media/20…

— jmartpolitico (@jmartpolitico) October 29, 2012

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Okay, let me get this straight. Apparently, according to Politico's John Harris, running ads against Mitt Romney for things that are true, like the fact that he is out of touch with most Americans and their struggles and that his time at Bain Capital just reinforces that, is somehow "personal," but Romney running lying ads about President Obama supposedly gutting welfare work requirements, calling him a "food stamp president" and diving into birtherism is somehow either not "personal" or it's not even worth mentioning during this segment on The Chris Matthews Show.

Here's Harris responding to Matthews asking him about their recent article: Verdict is in: Obama levels more personal attacks.

MATTHEWS: You know I thought John that Bill Clinton gave a heck of a punching kind of speech. He had every one of the Republican points, punched back at them. And the question is, how negative are they going to get? You say they're running... in your recent piece at Politico, you say that the Obama campaign is running a personal assault on whether this guy Romney is even qualified to be president.

HARRIS: The essence of what Obama's doing is to say Mitt Romney is just at a personal level not credible as a potential president of the United States because of his personal values – too greedy – his personal experience is too disconnected from the concerns of average Americans.

I'm not trying to give a Good Housekeeping seal of approval to the Romney campaign. They too are running an intensely negative campaign. It's not based so much on Obama's personal characteristics, his values, or that he is somehow, in some sort of fundamentally way... fundamental way, corrupt. Where as, the Obama people are calling Romney a charlatan, suggesting that he might be a felon because of how he's handled the Bain issue as Stephanie Cutter did. That's aimed at tearing him down personally.

But I don't have any sympathy for Romney. That's what he did in the Republican... he did that to Santorum and he did it to Gingrich.

The Politico article does admit that there are a bunch of personal attacks that have been waged against President Obama from others on the right, but they ignore or lie about the fact that many of them have come directly from the Romney campaign and they also give Romney a pass for not doing more to refute those on the right who have been happy to push those lies or to stand up to the extremists in his own party.

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Suspended Politico reporter Joe Williams on Monday accused conservative publications like the late Andrew Breitbart's Big Media and Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller of acting like a "schoolyard bully" by deliberately targeting him after he said GOP hopeful Mitt Romney was more comfortable around "white folks."

Speaking out for the first time since Politico suspended him indefinitely, Williams told Current TV's Bill Press that Big Media used "selective evidence" from comments about Romney on MSNBC and his Twitter account because they were in the business of "gathering scalps" from the so-called liberal media.

"It became about me and not about what I said," he explained. "And that was something that was common to a lot of what you talked about earlier: Chris Hayes, David Shuster, the list goes on. And, you know, now my name is on that list. But the problem I see here is it's not going to stop there."

"Part of the issue here is the fact that we have an organization -- we have a couple of organizations that have very clear agendas," Williams continued. "They're funded -- we don't quite exactly know how, but, certainly, they get their money to do what they do. Their agenda is quite clear. Their agenda is to make enough noise, to push back hard enough that organizations -- independent organizations, independent news organizations that have foundations, that have credibility to their name -- fold."

"Basically it's the schoolyard bully concept where if you make enough noise, if you push back hard enough, people are not going to fight back. ... They're in the business of gathering scalps."

When it comes to the comments about Romney, Williams did not seem eager to apologize.

"If I apologize for that, there are going to be many other people who have to as well because this is not a new sentiment," he pointed out, noting that the phrase "white folks" had been like waving a red flag in front of bull. "To me in my personal opinion at this point, those two words were the ones that set people off. You know, 'white folks,' 'Mitt Romney.' It's a match to a tender keg to certain segments of people who decided they want to push back on what they believe is the liberal media."

Williams also wouldn't say if he wanted to stay on at Politico.

"That's a question that we're working on," he told Press.

The Daily Caller on Monday revealed a March 30 tweet where Williams had accused Politico of an "overlay of blatant racism," calling it the "secret sauce in the Politico shitburger."

"Certainly at that point I was venting, I was spouting, I had frustrations at work, there were frustrations in some of the things that I saw that was going on on the Politico landscape," he recalled. "And I vented and in error and I vented in a public place and that was a huge mistake."

"There are a lot of frustrations in Washington, a lot of things that have racist kind of aura," Williams added. "Politico, by and large, has a lot of things to deal with, questions as far as that's concerned. Well, [minority] representation. Diversity is a problem for the entire D.C. press corps and I don't think Politico is an exception in that regard."

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Politico on Thursday suspended their veteran White House correspondent after several conservative websites complained that he had observed that presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney appeared to be more comfortable when he's around white people.

During a Thursday discussion with MSNBC's Martin Bashir about why Romney was trailing President Barack Obama among minorities, Politico's Joe Williams, who is black, noted that the candidate was most relaxed and unscripted on Fox & Friends where the people were white like him.

"It’s very interesting that he does so many appearances on Fox & Friends," Williams pointed out. "And it’s unscripted. It’s the only time they let Mitt off the leash, so to speak."

He continued: "But it also points out a larger problem he’s got to solve if he wants to be successful come this fall: Romney is very, very comfortable, it seems, with people who are like him. That’s one of the reasons why he seems so stiff and awkward in some town hall settings, why he can’t relate to people other than that."

"But when he comes on Fox & Friends, they’re like him. They’re white folks who are very much relaxed in their own company."

In a report on their website on Friday, Politico pointed to conservative websites Washington Free Beacon and Breitbart.com for flagging the remarks on MSNBC and tweets where Williams allegedly mocked Romney's wealth.

"Regrettably, an unacceptable number of Joe Williams's public statements on cable and Twitter have called into question his commitment to this responsibility," founders John Harris and Jim VandeHei wrote in a memo to Politico staff. "His comment about Governor Romney earlier today on MSNBC fell short of our standards for fairness and judgment in an especially unfortunate way."

"This appearance came in the context of other remarks on Twitter that, cumulatively, require us to make clear that our standards are serious, and so are the consequences for disregarding them. This is true for all POLITICO journalists, including an experienced and well-respected voice like Joe Williams."

"POLITICO journalists have a clear and inflexible responsibility to cover politics fairly and free of partisan bias," they added.

According to The New York Times, Romney has appeared on Fox & Friends 21 times in the last year alone.

(h/t: Mediaite)

From The Majority Report -- Unions Replace Wisconsin Flag with their Own...or Politico Reporter is Stupid:

Politico has deleted a post by reporter Donovan Slack where his union hate is so blinding, he confuses the Wisconsin state flag with a labor union flag.

Here's more from Gawker who got a screen shot before the post was pulled -- Politico Mistakes State Flag for Union Flag, Idiocy Ensues:

See that flag? It is the state flag of Wisconsin. On the top there is the name of the state, "Wisconsin," and on the bottom is the year that Wisconsin was admitted to the union.

Politico reporter Donovan Slack thought that this Wisconsin state flag was, in fact, a union flag, and that furthermore Barack Obama's choice to stand under this union flag in Wisconsin made it "very clear what side" he's on. Whoops.

Here's the cached version of Slack's story on this important issue—complete with photographic proof—which was posted at 12:02 p.m. yesterday on Politico's website (since disappeared): Read on...

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Fox News revealed on Wednesday what they believe could be a conspiracy between the "liberal-leaning press" and the "left-wing blog Politico" to make Republican presidential candidates appear weak.

"Is the mainstream media trying to spin the election?" Fox News host Gretchen Carlson asked legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr.

"There was a story in the left-wing blog Politico yesterday that basically said Republican candidates were too small," Johnson complained. "Then I watched some of the less-successful news channels last night and they talk about a cancer on all the Republicans -- the Republican political candidates, a cancer that they have, that the Republican Party has a Romney problem."

"And so what's going on is that the Republican candidates, including frontrunner Gov. Romney, are not only running against each other, but they are running against the mainstream media, and they are also running against the president of the United States," he explained. "So, it's a very difficult scenario for Republican candidates in this climate, when the mainstream media is all over them in such a big, big way."

Johnson continued: "In terms of scrutiny, there has to be fairness. And so, if you're a commentator and an analyst -- and I'm a commentator and an analyst -- say you're a commentator and an analyst. If you're an activist, say you're an activist, but to pretend you're a news person, to pretend that you're giving a fair and balanced view of things, when in fact you have no credentials to do that and you're only history is to engage in activism, is to engage in politics, is to engage in propaganda, then that's an unfair portrayal of the news to the American people."

"Because when Debbie Wasserman Schultz says that Mitt Romney had a bad night after a win," Carlson added, "we might expect that from the head of the [Democratic National Committee], but maybe not from the media."

"No, you shouldn't," Johnson agreed.

Just last week, Fox News also found a conspiracy within the Girl Scouts to "promote a clear liberal ideology."

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As stupid and as completely braindead as his campaign has been, in this testy little exchange with Mike Allen of Politico, Rick Perry actually manages to come off as sort of sharp for a change (comparatively speaking, of course). The access journalism practiced by Politico and others, always seeming to rely on "unnamed sources" for their stories, is really not much more than what the National Enquirer does.

Mike Allen, Politico: "Governor, some of your staffers have told us that you ran this as a gubernatorial campaign for too long and you didn't look big enough, get big enough, fast enough. Do you take some responsibility?"

Gov. Rick Perry: "I don't know who you are talking to, so I can't respond unless you give me a name."

Allen: "These are members of your staff."

Perry: "You got a name?"

Allen: "Who say --"

Perry: "You got a name?"

[awkward silence]

Allen: "You won't listen to --"

Perry: "You got a name?"

Allen: "Uh."

Perry: "If you don't have a name to tell me this individual said this, then I don't take that as a corroborating source."

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In today's episode of "Let Herman Be Herman", we once again hear from his campaign manager Mark Block that: they're no longer going to discuss this matter (though Block has been on Fox News every day this week discussing this matter); that they may sue Politico and that those reporters should be fired; that "the media has been a cesspool and were' not going to swim in that cesspool anymore." Block then ended that part of the interview, invoking Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment when asked about their earlier attacks on the Rick Perry campaign

The Cain campaign seems to have resorted to the belief that the best defense is a strong offense, no matter how offensive. They've now rolled out their version of High Tech Lynching, the visuals as subtle as a sledgehammer.

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Ever since the news broke of the sexual harassment allegations made against GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, the good little water carriers over at Fox have been doing their best to try to make excuses for him with claims that he's being unfairly attacked by the "liberal media" we all know doesn't exist, claims of racism and even going so far as to call Politico either a "news" outlet or "liberal" for breaking the story, both of which are laughable.

Politico, or Republico as we like to call them around here has pretty much been a Drudge Report/Republican propaganda recycling mill since they first came on line and in all likelihood, they got fed this story by one of Cain's rival campaigns.

Watch Goldberg twist himself in knots here trying to pretend that our tabloid, lazy, corporate media which is as much about sensationalism as they are reporting doesn't go after sex scandals when they involve Democrats as well. And his ridiculous claims that the only reason the media is going after Cain as hard as they are is because he's a black conservative which they consider to be some kind of traitor.

When asked to explain why black people being conservative supposedly drives liberals crazy, Goldberg plays the "black plantation" card here which is of course the popular conservative canard where they insult black people for their penchant to vote for Democrats, as though there are no real reasons for them to do so.

GOLDBERG: It's not just people in the mainstream media. I think it's liberals in general. For whatever reason, and I know I'm going to be criticized for using this term, black people are not allowed to stray from the liberal plantation. As long as they stay in line, as long as they let their liberal politicians tell them how much good they want to do for them and how much they care about them, then everything is okay. But when you have a black man present his case to America and it isn't a case for big government and it isn't a case for being protected by big government, it's... I think it's a little chilling and frightening to the liberal establishment and not just in the media, to liberals in general... don't like that kind of black man.

I can't speak for individuals which there are plenty of who don't understand why any black person in America would vote for Republicans because their policies don't promote civil rights and because of their use of racism as a wedge issue and the Southern Strategy that they've been using for decades now to win elections, but our media, not so much. They love to bring on black conservatives every chance they get for commentary and back and forth in their debate boxes where two sides are always treated as equal, even if one of those sides is still arguing that the earth is flat.

And naturally Goldberg couldn't allow himself to get through the segment here without bringing up the right's favorite African American boogeymen, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and of course their other favorite newspaper to beat up on, The New York Times, claiming that if Cain were a liberal, they'd be crying racism.

If you can say one thing for the right-wing media over at Fox, it's that they've got this whole feigned victimhood game while simultaneously viciously attacking anyone they want to go after down pat as we saw from Goldberg here. What's really shameful is that someone who's inspired as much hatred as Goldberg has is allowed on the air in the first place.