"Barack Obama: Charm offensive wins over angry crowd ... of reporters"

Guardian UK:

The mood among the US media pack that joined Barack Obama's tour on Monday was grumpy and rebellious. The 40-odd journalists boarding the campaign's Boeing 757, dubbed Obama One, in Jordan had paid thousands of dollars to accompany him but missed the first four days of a trip that took him to Afghanistan and Iraq - and information was in short supply.

"People were frustrated and upset at the start of the trip," one of the pack confirmed yesterday. But they traversed an arc in the course of the week.

The Democratic presidential candidate and his media team turned the mood around as they travelled from Israel to the West Bank and on to Germany and France, with the final stop in London today. The press corps was appeased when Obama, who prefers to sit on planes with his iPod and press cuttings or a book, ignoring staff and journalists, made a rare trip to the back of the Boeing en route from Israel to banter with reporters. Even rarer, he had an off-the-record dinner with them, at a French restaurant in Berlin on Thursday.

The restoration of relations with the press shows in the coverage he received throughout the week. He has been hailed as presidential, cable networks covered his Berlin speech live and almost every major US paper carried on their front pages a picture of him in front of a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin.

His Republican rival, John McCain, struggling to compete for coverage, acknowledged Obama's success when he joked during a speech in Ohio, alongside the Tour de France champion and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong on Thursday: "Tomorrow his tour takes him to France. In a scene Lance would recognise, a throng of adoring fans awaits Senator Obama in Paris - and that's just the American press."

It did not look like adoration on Monday. The disgruntled media pack clashed with Obama's team on the flight from Amman to Israel. The team offered an off-the-record account of a meeting between him and King Abdullah of Jordan: the reporters wanted it on the record, arguing it was presumptuous of Obama to expect White House rules on anonymity to apply while he was just a candidate. The Obama team walked away. There was another, bigger gripe. No journalist had accompanied Obama on one of the most newsworthy parts of the trip, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the television and print journalists had to rely on camera footage shot by the US military and a Senate aide on his mobile phone, raising questions about the ethics of using such material. Obama was able to get pictures of himself in the war zones on US domestic television while retaining total control.

MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, who is covering the trip, went on air this week to complain about "fake interviews because they are not interviews from a journalist" but by the military.

The tetchiness was not confined to the travelling pack. Journalists left in the US, including Washington-based foreign correspondents, expressed unhappiness. Christopher von Marschall, Washington bureau chief of the Berlin-based daily Der Tagesspiegel, who has written a biography of Obama, complained about the candidate's "dirty little secret", saying that Obama had failed to take foreign journalists with him and in general was reluctant to make time for foreign journalists.

It is unusual for Obama to get a bad press. His media team, led by strategist David Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune political correspondent, has been disciplined and relatively leak-free, and generally more accessible than Hillary Clinton's during the primary campaigns.

Only when polls are published can the success of the trip be judged. A Republican National Committee memo published yesterday anticipated Obama would receive a "bump" in the polls.

The crowds in Berlin will reassure Americans wanting to be loved again after the Bush years. But there is a potential downside to these scenes. Tucker Bounds, McCain's spokesman, described the Berlin scenes as "a premature victory lap", an angle that the Republicans will exploit in the months ahead. They can combine it with Obama's cancellation of a visit to US troops in hospital in Germany. Responding to criticism about the presence of so few foreign journalists on the plane, Linda Douglass, Obama's spokeswoman, told the Guardian from Berlin that there had been 200 media requests to accompany Obama but 40 places. As for the lack of reporters on the Afghanistan and Iraq legs, she said: "It was an official Congressional visit... The trip had nothing to do with the campaign." The campaign leg began in Amman.

She added that the candidate, who she said was only getting four hours' sleep a night, had done foreign media interviews, giving two to Israeli dailies, and that the travelling pack was getting "more access to him than they want. They have a pool camera that is with him from when he gets up to when he goes to bed."

Barack Obama