Tag Results for Scott Brown

From increased truck sales to action figures to a genealogical link to President Obama. Can the media find any more angles on the new Senator?  Now that’s he’s on the job, will the coverage change?

Scott Brown’s election has been called a referendum on healthcare, and President Obama and the economy.  The media has not stopped speculating on what Brown’s win meant even without reliable election day exit polling.  So what is the speculation based upon?

The majority of hosts backed Scott Brown, interviewing him regularly and giving him positive exposure. Did talk radio play in the Senate election?

Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown became a national sensation as the first Republican to win a US Senate race since the 1970s. Since his victory on Jan. 19th, the coverage of Brown has been non-stop. How is the media shaping Brown's image?

"Beat the Press" panelists sound off on their rants and raves of the week: Topics include WCVB's election night coverage; the New York Times charging for online content; sympathy levels for outgoing NBC host Conan O'Brien; coverage of the Supreme Court's ruling on corporate campaign spending; and using political party surrogates as political analysts.

Over on the Don't Quote Me blog, our friend Adam Reilly has a good post on why, periodically, seemingly sure-thing Democratic candidates from Massachusetts flame out and blow up in big political races.

http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/dontquoteme/archive/2010/01/19/brown-v-coakl...

The Massachusetts Senate race gains plenty of steam as recent polls revealed a much closer race than expected and won the attention of the national press. Did the polls reflect Republican Scott Brown's popularity or did they fuel his sudden momentum?

The Beat the Press panel offer their own rants and raves about the media this week - including WCVB-Channel 5’s handling of the Gail Huff-Scott Brown marriage; fallout from the NBC late night feud between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien; Google's decision to no longer support China's censoring of searches; and media comparisons between former President Bush's response to Hurrican Katrina and President Obama's response to the Haiti earthquake.

Note to users: We're going to tackle polls and how they may have affected the stretch run in the Massachusetts US Senate race on "Beat the Press" this week, so I thought I would throw this out there.

The left-leaning blog Blue Mass Group has just released results of a new poll showing Democrat Martha Coakley with a 49 to 41 percent advantage over Republican Scott Brown with just 5 percent undecided.

BMG supports Coakley, of course, but says its poll is more accurate than other recent polls by Rasmussen Reports and Public Policy Polling. Those polls showed the race tighter, but relied on robo calls instead of live voter interviews. BMG says its poll was conducted by Research 2000 and relies exclusively on 500 person-to-person interviews with likely voters.

The poll shows Coakley's lead slipping considerably from the 15 point advantage she enjoyed in the last non-robo poll, which was conducted by the Boston Globe jsut before Monday's final televised debate.

Update: A new Suffolk University poll - which did not rely on robo-calls - has Brown up by four percent, 50 to 46. Technically its a statistical dead heat, since the result is within the polls' margin of error, but the consensus is that Brown is surging.

Memo to Martha Coakley: When the conventional media narrative is that your opponent is gaining steam, it's a bad time to have the wheels come off your campaign.

The political media loves a horse race, which is why there's been so much more attention to the US Senate campaign in Massachusetts since polls (albeit internal ones reported through anonymous sources and suspect ones that rely on robo calls) show the race tightening.

Imagine the extra delight over the last 24 hours then, as the race has seemed more like NASCAR than Suffolk Downs.

Fresh of what many perceived as a lackluster performance in Monday night's last televised debate, Democratic candidate and state Attorney General Martha Coakley released her first attack ad against Republican State Representative Scott Brown, only to have to embarrassingly pull it down because someone spelled her home state "Massachusettes" (sic) in the fine print at the end.

Then last night, a reporter from the conservative magazine and web site The Weekly Standard, was following Coakley down a Washington D.C. sidewalk, videotaping her and asking questions. Reporter John McCormack he says he was bumped into a low metal railing and fell, ripping his pants in the process.

McCormack blamed Democratic campaign operative Michael Meehan for "pushing" him into the railing. Meehan has denied any intentional pushing. A videotape of the incident - classily titled "Coakley Thug Roughs Up Reporter" by The Weekly Standard - shows mostly the aftermath of McCormack's fall and his subsequent interaction with Meehan.

Roughs up? Um, no. Sorry. The tape clearly shows Meehan helping McCormack up and asking if he's "alright." But then, disturbingly, Meehan continues to block McCormack from following Coakley down the sidewalk, demanding his identification and credentials - an action that is clearly out-of-bounds given the normal rules of media engagement on a public sidewalk.

By way of explanation, Meehan said he was concerned that McCormack was an operative from a rival campaign and followed up with this curious statement to the Herald: “Reporters get to ask questions. That’s totally legit. Republican operatives can’t chase a candidate down the street.”

Seriously? Gee, Mike, I had no idea that private campaign consultants had legal authority to control the actions of US citizens on a public sidewalk. Thanks for setting me straight on that one.

As if it's not bad enough for Coakley that the incident plays into Brown's narrative that she's aloof and part of the elitist Democratic establishment, the situation is entirely of her own making. Memo to Martha Coakley Part II: If you don't want to be videotaped or asked questions on a public sidewalk, get someone on a cell phone and have the car meet you at the door.

And of course the incident took on a different character depending on what media prism you viewed it through.

Globe: A campaign aide to Democratic US Senate candidate Martha Coakley has acknowledged that he acted too aggressively in an incident Tuesday night in which he jostled a reporter for a conservative magazine ... and the reporter fell to the ground.

Associated Press: A reporter trying to question the Democrat seeking to replace Edward Kennedy in the Senate has been involved in a scuffle with one of her advisers.

The Herald: Bay State Attorney General Martha Coakley blamed GOP “stalkers” today for triggering tensions outside a Washington, D.C., fund-raiser last night where a Weekly Standard reporter said he was roughed up by a Coakley campaign volunteer.

But no matter how this particular incident is percieved, Coakley's campaign is creating the impression that she's unable to handle even a minor bit of adversity. And a wounded Coakley fits squarely into the conventional horse-race narrative that political reporters and editors have been dying for during this campaign.

It's a narrative that, accurate or not, we're going to have to live with for the next six days.