Dylan Byers wonders if Romney’s strict avoidance of the mainstream media is backfiring:
The Romney team’s M.O. has been to pursue softball coverage in lieu of potentially dangerous interviews. He agreed to interviews with soft-lens magazines like Parade and People, but not with newsmagazines or websites, or even with the Boston Globe reporters who are writing a biography of the candidate. He has avoided The New York Times as well, and his only policy-oriented interview — foreign policy, exclusively — with The Washington Post was granted to blogger Jennifer Rubin, who holds similar views. Romney also avoids reporters’ questions on the trail. When confronted by a Times reporter about this, he countered that he had press avails “almost every day” — a preposterous stretch of the word “almost.” (In fact, the reporter noted, Romney’s most recent press avail had been nearly a week earlier.)
Meanwhile, as Greg Sargent notes, a Romney adviser is now defending the campaign’s deliberately misleading attack ad on Obama by explaining that “by definition all all political ads are ‘manipulative’ and ‘propaganda.'” Tom Edsall has more.
The Dish 