Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Chris Christie and Donald Trump are complaining that the press has been in the tank for Marco Rubio ever since reporters declared Rubio the bigger winner when he came in third in the Iowa caucuses.
The Wall Street Journal declared Rubio Iowa’s “second-biggest winner” due to his “strong third-place finish.” Meanwhile, Trump was cast as the “biggest loser” even though he came in second.
Reuters noted Cruz’s win but called Rubio “another big winner.”
Those reports and others have the other candidates saying the media fix is in for Rubio.
“All week, the media is trying to make [us] coalesce around Marco Rubio,” Christie said Sunday on Fox News. “After you saw that performance last night, do you think they should be coalescing around Marco Rubio?”
For Cruz, the hit came a few days earlier, just after the Iowa caucuses where Rubio saw a third-place finish. “I understand that in the media newsrooms and in the Washington establishment circles, Marco is the chosen one,” said Cruz, who won the caucuses. “In the media’s telling, bronze is the new gold.”
Trump had similar views about news coverage of the caucus results. “The headline is, ‘Winner Of The Night, Marco Rubio; Trump Humiliated’,” Trump said last week at a campaign rally, mocking news coverage that played his second-place finish in the caususes as though it were worse than Rubio’s third-place finish.
To be fair, the press has taken some shots at Rubio, and even spent a few days making fun of his heeled boots. The press also put him under the microscope after Saturday’s GOP debate, where Rubio was called out by Christie for repeating a line multiple times about President Obama, nearly word for word. Christie accused Rubio of being overly scripted and lacking depth.
“Marco Chokes,” said a headline at Politico.
In an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” anchor George Stephanopoulos said to Rubio, “That was not a good moment for you, was it?” Other news outlets used the words “robotic” and “canned” to describe Rubio’s performance.
One reporter who’s covering the 2016 election said he couldn’t see any clear evidence that Rubio was preferred by the mainstream press.
“I’m not sure if I accept the premise that Rubio’s the ‘media’ candidate,” said the reporter, who asked not to be named so he could talk candidly about the subject he covers. “He’s more walled off from the press than most of the GOP field and has had a number of tough stories against him that felt a little like they were overreaching. That said, I think the center-right media tends to be very supportive of him. And Donald Trump has of course dominated the media, so there’s not necessarily a clear narrative here.”
Still, some prominent voices in the national media defended Rubio from the “scripted” criticism, in what could be a sign that the press is rooting for Rubio over outsider candidates Cruz and Trump.
Liberal Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus said that it would be “wrong” to write off Rubio based on the debate. “The Rubio I’ve seen is appealing, engaging and, yes, spontaneous.”
Also in the Post, Marc Thiessen, a Republican, chocked Rubio’s repeated one-liner as a sign of “message discipline.”
“[E]very politician repeats the best lines over and over and over,” he wrote. “It’s how elections are won.”
Howard Kurtz, a longtime media critic who worked for the Washington Post and now hosts a show at Fox News, said the same thing: “Don’t voters assume that most politicians memorize canned lines and zingers in a debate?”
