Palin speech is latest in GOP fight with media

“Annoy the media, vote Republican,” goes the slogan on bumper stickers sold by vendors at conservative gatherings.

“In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism,” Vice President Spiro Agnew declared in assailing the news media in 1970. Like Palin, Agnew was relatively little-known governor before becoming the vice presidential candidate.

'Fraternity of privileged men'
The news business, he said, was controlled by a “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.” Agnew’s attacks on the media elite made him a hero to GOP audiences.

“We’re not going to have this foolishness,” Renee Amore, deputy chairman of Pennsylvania’s Republican Party, said at a press briefing at the convention Wednesday as she and other McCain supporters denounced rumors circulating on the Internet, which include accusations that Palin faked a pregnancy.

“You can do what you want to do, but we’re going to keep coming back at you,” she vowed to reporters.

Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., said to me on the convention floor a few hours before Palin spoke, “Republican leaders like me are holding the news media to account the same way you would hold me to account if I were to ask an illegal question of a job applicant. I was asked both by CNN and the Lehrer News Hour, ‘Can Gov. Palin be vice president and a mom at the same time?’ Was John Kennedy ever asked that question about being president and a dad?”

She added, “It’s being driven by news media folks talking to each other.”

Former GOP presidential contender Mike Huckabee also lashed out Wednesday morning.

Palin, he said, was “under this relentless attack by the media, which I think America's very angry about.”

Accusation of sexism
Americans, he said, “know that these are questions that have never been asked of a male running for president. Never. Never would be. People are seeing a sexism that is really, really disgusting and embarrassing.”

Huckabee decried the stories about Palin’s 17-year old daughter, Bristol, who is pregnant.

Video   Todd: ‘Conservatives have found their Obama’ Sept. 3: NBC’s Chuck Todd tells MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that Sarah Palin may be the future of the Republican Party. MSNBC

Americans are “rallying around Sarah Palin, even people that don't necessarily vote Republican, but they're saying that this is so blatantly and obviously a vicious attack on somebody who is not even on the ballot. Her daughter!”

He added, “They never did this to Chelsea Clinton.”

In a statement Wednesday afternoon, McCain spokesman Steve Schmidt denounced news stories on the background check done by McCain’s team on the Alaska governor.

“This vetting controversy is a faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee for Vice President of the United States who has never been a part of the old boys’ network that has come to dominate the news establishment in this country,” Schmidt fumed.

It was if Agnew had come back to life to condemn the “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.”

And Eisenhower’s analysis remains pertinent: Republicans now as in 1964 believe that most people in the new business “couldn’t care less about the good of our party.”

All the more reason, some Republicans feel, to vote and “annoy the media.”

NBC News/National Journal's Carrie Dann contributed to this report.

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