Kicked Off: Maureen Dowd Banned From Campaign Plane
By Angela Carson
Sep 30, 2008
The New York Times and John McCain really don't seem to like each other all that well and it appears the disagreement may have spilled over into a campaign plane ban for Times columnist Maureen Dowd. McCain Campaign chief Steve Schmidt scalded the New York Times just last week in a conference call where he ripped the paper and screamed bias.
Maureen Dowd Banned From Campaign Plane
"Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization," Schmidt said. "This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate."
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Now a nugget buried deep in a Washington Post column from media critic Howard Kurtz has this, "Outside, on a summerlike evening, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs held forth for the likes of NBC’s Chuck Todd and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who was wearing an Elvis T-shirt. (The company may have been more pleasant than that of McCain aides, who have barred Dowd from the candidate’s plane….)"
So is she off? The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has this from Dowd, "I had had a great relationship with John McCain for 16 years, through columns he liked and didn't like. So at first I thought it was a mistake and doublechecked with the press office. They said I was banned from both planes for 'the foreseeable future.' Then [McCain spokeswoman] Nicole Wallace was gloating about it to reporters on the Palin plane."