Like a great baseball hitter, Gingrich saw moderator John King's question about the matter as a hanging curveball, looming big as a beach ball in the middle of the plate - and he parked it in the bleachers.
"I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans," Gingrich thundered at the end of an extended riff. The crowd in the North Charleston debate hall stood as one and roared.
Media-bashing has a long and successful history in the Republican politics of the last five decades, a go-to move that rarely fails to arouse the base.
At the 1964 convention in San Francisco that nominated Barry Goldwater, for instance, delegates stood and faced the press galleries and glassed-in network broadcast booths perched in the rafters of the old Cow Palace. They shook their fists, jeered, and booed as speakers excoriated the media for painting the GOP as a nest of right-wing extremists.
Animus toward the media seemed to grow more pronounced in the 1960s as many conservatives believed that Vietnam War protesters and the counterculture were being glorified at their expense. The Merle Haggard country hit "Okie from Muskogee" captures that sentiment.
In 1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew launched a famous attack on the news media for criticism of the Nixon administration, telling an audience in San Diego that "we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism." Agnew fired other alliterative insults straight from the SAT verbal section: "pusillanimous pussyfooters" and "vicars of vacillation" among them. The phrases have been attributed to erudite speechwriter (and later New York Times columnist) William Safire.
