Will McCain Keep His Promise to the Press?

Is John McCain planning to renege on a longstanding promise to make himself regularly available to reporters should he become president? I don't know, because his campaign won't say. But it's sure looking that way.

Here's the background: In October 2005, McCain was a featured speaker at the American Magazine Conference in Fajardo, Puerto Rico. In front of an auditorium full of magazine editors and executives, McCain criticized President George Bush's hostile treatment of the media. McCain said that if he were president, he would cultivate good relations with the press by holding biweekly press conferences -- what he called "the Kennedy model." "You're going to answer the question sooner or later, so it might as well be sooner," he said, even if it meant enduring "some pretty good scrubbings from the media."

Of course, all that was long before the Arizona senator chose to make media-bashing a primary plank in his 2008 platform. Just today, his top strategist, Steve Schmidt, went to town on The New York Times, harrumphing that the paper, which has been reporting on the campaign's ties to mortgage-industry lobbyists, "is today not by any standard a journalistic organization" Schmidt's outburst follows weeks of attacks on the press over its supposedly unfair treatment of Sarah Palin.

It's hard to imagine the McCain who claims to see reporters as members of a vast left-wing conspiracy is still willing to submit himself to interrogation at the hands of those same reporters every fortnight. So I put the question, via email and phone messages, to three McCain spokesmen: Is the candidate willing to reiterate his pledge to hold biweekly press conferences as president?

I haven't heard back from any of them. If any fellow journalists are reading this out on the campaign trail, maybe you could press for an answer?

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