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Take it to the bank!
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Date Posted: Thu, May 22, 2008 5:06:25
SAN JOSE - For much of this week, reporters from a number of news organizations have been fighting a decision by John McCain's campaign to restrict access to the 71-year-old candidate's medical records to a small group of reporters hand-selected by the campaign.
The long-delayed release is set for Friday in Arizona, but campaign aides told several print news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, earlier this week that only one national newspaper, the Washington Post, and one local newspaper, the Arizona Republic, would be permitted to view McCain's health records -- providing a "pool report" to the other print reporters who travel with the candidate.
McCain's health is of keen interest among voters, who frequently ask him about his age and whether he has any medical problems during his town hall meetings. For some, the limited access to documents - which will not be released or available to be photocopied - could raise questions about McCain's pledge that his administration "will set a new standard for transparency and accountability."
The campaign has also been under fire for delaying the release of the documents. A reporter for The Times was told last year they planned to release records of McCain's health exams within weeks. They did not. Earlier this year, campaign aides said the records would be available in mid-April, and that was pushed to Friday.
The records will span the last eight years including 2000, when McCain underwent more than five hours of surgery to remove a melanoma, a cancerous skin lesion, from his right temple. Doctors conducted exploratory surgery at that time, shortly after McCain withdrew from the 2000 presidential race, to determine if the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes, but it had not. McCain has since said he is cancer free, and his aides say he is in excellent health.
On Friday, the campaign is allowing television reporters and three wire services -- Bloomberg, Reuters and the Associated Press -- to review the records, in addition to the two newspapers. Other news organizations will have access to a 90-minute conference call with McCain's physicians and summaries of the records posted online, though it was not immediately clear who would be writing those summaries.
On Monday, McCain's national spokesman, Tucker Bounds, defended the decision: "For very sensible, logistical reasons we will be hosting several reporters from different mediums to review the records," he said, "and it will be an unprecedented amount of transparency into the good health of a presidential candidate."
The records available Friday will not include the more than a 1,000 pages of medical records McCain released in 1999 during his first run for the White House.
Those documents included hundreds of pages of reports from McCain's health exams at the Robert E. Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies at the Naval Operational Medicine Institute in Pensacola, Fla..
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McCain has something to hide regarding his health! This proves it!!! Doesn't America have a right to know his health?????????????????
