Blamefest: A Glimpse of a State-of-the-Art Media Campaign

Here’s a tiny glimpse into the current state-of-the-art media campaign.

As the Mitt Romney campaign tries to slow down Mike Huckabee’s surge in Iowa, they have long since begun issuing harsh criticisms of Huckabee’s past actions and statements. On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Romney called on Huckabee to apologize for describing President Bush’s foreign policy as “arrogant” and suffering from a “bunker mentality.”

On Sunday, the Romney campaign also sent to its media list a long, blistering attack on the piece, which is not so much a rebuttal to the substance as it is a compendium of bad reviews given to the piece by the National Review, The American Spectator, Fox News, Politico, radio host Hugh Hewitt, Bill Sammon of the Washington Examiner, the neocon analyst Victor Davis Hanson, and,  of Minnesota note, both Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters and Paul Mirengoff of  Powerline.None of these commentators gave Huckabee’s piece any compliments, at least in the portions quoted in the Romney press release. This is not surprising. But it is impressive — and a comment on the currently involved state of the media (by the way, several of the links are to videos) –  how quickly and easily a blamefest like this can be assembled and distributed.

If you click through to the full Romney piece, you can then click through to the full text of the dozen or more denunciamentos (I haven’t done this and am not sure I will get to them all) and could spend several hours reading, watching and listening to how bad Huckabee’s article was, without coming across a contrary note.

Interesting to contemplate how this treatment might influence the piece of a mainstream objective reporter writing about the state of the Romney-Huckabee contest in Iowa, or about the quality of Huckabee’s foreign policy thinking. But I offer it mostly so you can see what reporters are getting from the campaigns.