US Elections: Obama Campaign Smooths Rift With Press During World Trip

The mood among the US media pack that joined Barack Obama's overseas 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 media pack confirmed today. 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 tomorrow.

The press corps was appeased when Obama, who prefers to sit on plane journeys with his iPod and a pile of press cuttings or a book, ignoring staff as well as 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 an old French restaurant in Berlin, the Borchardt, last night.

Obama's success in restoring relations with the press shows in the coverage he received throughout the week. He has been hailed by US columnists as presidential, US cable networks covered his Berlin speech live and almost every major US paper today 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 media coverage, acknowledged Obama's success when he joked during a speech in Columbus, Ohio, alongside the Tour de France champion and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong last night: "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 short flight from Amman to Israel.

Obama's 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 presumptive of Obama to expect White House rules on anonymity to apply while he was still just a candidate. The Obama team walked away.

There was another and 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 earlier 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 behind in the US, including Washington-based foreign correspondents, also expressed unhappiness.

Christopher von Marschall, Washington bureau chief of the Berlin-based daily Der Tagesspiegel, who has written a biography of Obama, complained in a comment piece in the Washington Post on Sunday 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's team to get a bad press. From the launch of his campaign in February last year, Obama has enjoyed a sympathetic press.

His media team, led by his 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 the first polls are published can the success of the trip be judged. The Republican National Committee, in a memo published today, 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 hospitalised in Germany.

Obama's spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said it was decided that it would be inappropriate "as part of a trip funded by the campaign".

Responding to criticism about the presence of only a few foreign journalists on the plane, Linda Douglass, Obama's senior spokeswoman, told the Guardian from Berlin that there had been 200 media requests to accompany Obama but only 40 places.

As for the lack of reporters on the Afghanistan and Iraq legs, she said: "The reason there were no reporters along on Afghanistan and Iraq is it was an official congressional visit, one those kind of trips you do not bring press with them. The trip had nothing to do with the campaign," Douglass said. 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 traveling pack was getting "more access to him than they want. They have a pool camera that is with him from when he gets up in the morning to when he goes to bed. They get every word he says."

Journalists aboard generally concurred.

"In an ideal world, we would all want 24 hours access - while they want to control us," one of the reporters on the plane said.

But the reporter agreed that access had been good, and that almost everyone aboard had had an interview with him. "Whatever the concern at the start has now gone," the reporter said.