On The Plane
Ana Marie Cox participates in one of the weirdest rituals of the dying media paradigm:
Mostly, to the road. It was, as I said, a five state day today. There was a lot of rushing around, much hauling of crap, a ton of waiting in lines. Also some of the world’s most awkward motorcades (anything that involves a bus, basically). And yet I felt like I had seen so remarkable little. I ran the numbers, and, clearly, I felt like I didn’t see much because I didn’t:
Not only is this business of traveling with the candidate not very useful, with its huge ratio of time spent traveling to time spent doing stuff, but it’s also quite expensive for the news organization paying for your travel. And yet, it’s considered essential to do it. After all, that’s “reporting.” And reporting, as we all know, is the essence of “journalism.” Spend hours on planes and buses and so forth and vast sums of money and then you can report on what John McCain said at a rally. Sit at home and watch the rally on television or look up transcripts, and that’s not reporting at all. Sure, you’d save a lot of time and that time could be spent gathering information. And sure, you watching the rally on TV at your desk where you have your internet connection makes it easier to find facts and put things in context. But the important thing is to do the reporting.
50 Responses to “On The Plane”
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November 3rd, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Cox was on On The Media this weekend talking about her plight. She said that she was even considering offering things to people who contributed (she was soliciting funds for her travels with the campaign).
I couldn’t help but think: hmm, wasn’t her journalistic claim to fame an obsession with anal sex?
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Matt, I know that you’re being dumb on purpose here, but reporting is what happens when you find something else odd/interesting while you’re covering the story of the day. It’s like science — it’s often the discoveries that you make along the way to your intended destination that matter the most.
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:51 pm
If no one was going to these rallies and actually reporting on them, we wouldn’t know anything about all of the crackers shouting “terrorist” and “kill him!”
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Well, yeah, but, of course, you’d like to think that, wouldn’t you?
You’ve never reported.
As a boy blogger you pontificate on things ranging from the financial crisis to labor to the political predilections of working-class voters to the NBA to reforming public schools, none of which you’re in any way qualified to discuss. Certainly not on anything but the most rudimentary dorm-room-ranting bullshit level.
I hate to be harsh. You’re a smart guy (with good progressive intentions), but when all is said and done you’re just a young Harvard boy pontificating out of his ass. Though, hey, you do love a good chart!
True, campaign journalism can be a little silly, but at least its journalism.
(Spencer Ackerman, interestingly enough, does report. But he’s none too bright and an awful writer. You know, maybe you two could work as a team. He could do the bulk of the legwork and you could filter it through an intelligent mind that has some facility with prose. Well, something to perhaps think about that.)
Finally, besides your own motives you might also want to reflect on media entities, corporate and other, for whom it’s much cheaper to hire twentysomething kids like yourself to type away in well intentioned ignorance than it is to actually send journalists out to do actual reporting.
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I suppose there are reasons for the final day schedules for McCain and Palin. Someone help me. McCain is making an appearance in TN. He leads BIG in TN. Palin is making an appearance in Iowa. Her ticket is down BIG in Iowa. The Republicans are going to lose Iowa’s electoral votes and win TN’s. Why are McCain and Palin spending precious time and resources in either state at this stage of the game?
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:00 pm
You know, the TV networks could solve this problem if they were willing to make full use of their affiliates. Right now, it’s deemed essential to have the familiar face at all of the events, so a couple guys get dragged from city to city, following the candidate around for a whole year. But TV networks have professional reporters in literally every city in the nation — the staff of the local affiliates’ news shows. Sure, they’d lose the ability to manufacture a “famous” reporter, which *might* hurt their ratings (although I bet all it really does is improve that reporter’s ability to command a higher salary). They ought to be able to have an equally strong ratings advantage by branding themselves as the network with the broadest base of journalists. “Watch us, the network with the BIGGEST politicial team — bigger than all the other networks together!” Hey presto, they didn’t just save a ton on air travel, they also became the national news show with the best local coverage.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Matt, I’ve always thought of you as a blogger who knew journalism, so this surprises me. I’ve spent a lot of time reporting on the campaign trail. If all you’re doing is going to a speech and transcribing the speech, you’re doing a lousy job of reporting. The point of being on the road is so you can talk to people behind the scenes, so you can observe things that might escape notice, so you can talk to the people who are at the rallies or — more importantly — are not at the rallies but live in the city/town/state. THAT’S reporting, and it can’t be done from an armchair or over the Internet.
Now, I agree: Anyone traveling with the candidate who is just rewriting press releases or transcribing speeches is wasting their time. But that’s not what a good journalist is doing.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:06 pm
I think the defenders of the traditional media here are full of shit. They support the “football commentator” form of journalism — which tells you who has the ball and what’t they’re doing. Plus a lot of cheerleading along the way.
That’s fine –except the stands are badly rusted and about to collapse and there’s one doctor in the entire stadium.
The news media hasn’t told us jack shit about the true state of the nation — the problems that are arising and the actions that need to be taken.
They cover the trainwrecks –AFTER the trainwrecks occur — because sending a reporter out to check on the state of the railroad is just too damm hard.
Fuck the traditional news media . They get rich off the PUBLIC airwaves and give a shitty product in return. This country is being sold down the river by corrupt factions and the news media is complicit in that treason.
You can find out a lot more checking Internet databases and trade publications than you can from watching the morons on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:09 pm
“The point of being on the road is so you can talk to people behind the scenes, so you can observe things that might escape notice, so you can talk to the people who are at the rallies or — more importantly — are not at the rallies but live in the city/town/state. THAT’S reporting, and it can’t be done from an armchair or over the Internet.”
But none of those things are particularly worthwhile. It’s reasonable to do a little bit of that, which journalists in all countries do, but not to waste tremendous amounts of time and money doing it, which only crazy americans do.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:18 pm
I don’t know how this works, but… Are news organizations paying to put their reporters on campaign planes/buses? How much are they paying, and how far does this go to help keep the campaign planes flying? That’s something I’d like to see reported.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I knew that Wonkette hadn’t gone over to the MSM but was really a blogoliscious mole. Not only does she explain how silly freequent flier journalism is, but she managed to sneak a peace sign in disguised as an exploded pie chart.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Re “It’s reasonable to do a little bit of that, which journalists in all countries do, but not to waste tremendous amounts of time and money doing it”
————
I strongly concur. But American journalism today consists of performing analingus on a candidate so that you can maintain “access” and be allowed to write down whatever line of bullshit the candidate is handling out today.
What the voters need to KNOW , on the other hand, is the state of the environment. What has the incumbant done for the common citizen, for good or ill? Backed up by hard numbers, not bullshit opinions, damm it.
For both candidates — what are their values, as shown by past actions. What are their allegiances –who’s funding them and what do they want? What are their qualifications to dealing with oncoming problems? What con games are they running — where and how are they lying to the voters?
You can cover a candidate a hell of a lot better 400 miles away doing research rather than sitting in a stupid shit staged campaign rally.
My goddamm Republican Congressman , Jim Gerlach , has been on the House Banking Committee for years. Yes–the Committee most directly responsible for the ongoing financial disaster.
Yet ole Jim is skating to reelection because our “journalists” don’t see fit to tell the voters in my district just how badly Jim screwed the pooch.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:28 pm
# too many steves Says:
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:51 pm
If no one was going to these rallies and actually reporting on them, we wouldn’t know anything about all of the crackers shouting “terrorist” and “kill him!”
Except that most of the reporting that I’ve seen on that has actually been done by groups like the Keystone Progressives and ANP, who have taken videocameras to Palin rallies to find knuckledraggers.
I guess that CNN and other folks did get some of this on tape at the rally, too, but it’s not like that would go completely unnoticed.
Matt is making his point provocatively, but I think we’d learn a lot more about the candidates if there were many more news conferences and 1-on-1 interviews, rather than these rallies. The NY Times spent something like a half million the last year sending reporters on to these rallies. That was money poorly spent.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Watching a video or reading a transcript makes it very hard to say anything about the atmosphere at a rally, or talk to the people there, or mention any noteworthy peculiarities, like that time lots of children had to miss a schoolday to fill out the picture.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:36 pm
On preview, what Fred App said.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Wow, “Somewhere A.J. Liebling is rolling his eyes”, your post is almost as pretentious as your name.
If the number of journalists following the candidates like lemmings declined by 80%, the amount of journalism done by those following the candidates would be the same.
If that 80% of the lemmings instead spent their time analyzing the candidates campaign messages, and did some investigative journalism in which they interviewed experts or consulted reference material to check the veracity or impact of the candidates messages, the amount of journalism done would increase.
Instead, they follow along looking for another angle, to present essentially nothing in the air-space or collumn-space that they are on the hook for filling.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Fred App: I’ve spent a lot of time reporting on the campaign trail. If all you’re doing is going to a speech and transcribing the speech, you’re doing a lousy job of reporting. The point of being on the road is so you can talk to people behind the scenes, so you can observe things that might escape notice, so you can talk to the people who are at the rallies or — more importantly — are not at the rallies but live in the city/town/state. THAT’S reporting, and it can’t be done from an armchair or over the Internet.
The talking to people behind the scenes, though – isn’t that the garnish (or a side dish at best) rather than the main meal? And I’d think you could get interviews with the people at the rallies, and atmosphere stuff, over the wire from the local paper or TV channel.
What I’d expect the national press to do is not ‘transcribe’ the candidate’s speeches, but analyze them, provide context, and check for accuracy and plausibility. You folks know what’s in the candidate’s stump speech, because you hear it every day. Good – take the stump speech, report on it as a thing in itself, tell us what the main points are, tell us whether its facts are really facts, tell us whether the programs or cuts are plausible, things like that. There’s the main course, and you’ve never once served it up in all the years I’ve been reading political stories.
And you can do that from your desk, much more easily than you can from the campaign trail.
Then you can tell us when the candidate says something new and different, and how it differs. And again with the fact-checking and so forth.
Then you can go to the candidate’s website, and report on what the candidate’s saying about issues X, Y, and Z. How would his program affect different classes of Americans? Are the changes he proposes realistic? Is he saying one thing on his website, and another on the stump? Are his advisers on the same page, or do they have a different word on these issues?
Again, you can do this best from your desk.
I think there are things that can best be done by shoe-leather reporters, and it’s important that these things be done well. Few of us will ever be in a war zone, and we’re rarely at the scene of a disaster in its immediate aftermath, and in those situations, reportorial boots on the ground are invaluable. And there are times when a beat reporter can sniff out a scandal that everyone else misses, and makes the contacts that eventually enable him/her to work up the ladder, and find out what it’s really about.
But far more often, the reporter talking to that background or off-the-record source is talking to the well-connected insider with a spin, rather than some guy four levels down who knows that something fishy is happening up the ladder. There’s no value added from that – hell, that’s actually value subtracted.
We’re due for a serious analysis of what TV and newspaper reporters actually do, what they should be doing, and how much of it can best be done with nothing more than a computer, a desk, and a phone.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm
By segregating themselves into a pack the thing that ends up getting covered is the press corp itself. These navel gazing exercises just highlight the point.
McCain made it worth their while when he was still going to the back of the bus and plane to hold court with them. Of course what he said was never actually reported on or if it was only in the best light. Other than that being on the place or the bus or the bus behind the candidate offers only one thing. The chance to get spun by the spinners.
It does have the advantage of keeping them away from the proles. Always a good thing, especially for their self esteem.
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Covering the campaign itself while traveling with the campaign is a stupid waste of money. It’s an arrangement that gives the campaign all the power.
Riding the bus is not a chance to observe reality, it’s paying to make your people a captive audience for the campaign’s spin.
There may have been a time when riding the bus was necessary, before mass communications and 24/7 media relations.
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Not only do I think it is a waste of time for the reporters to follow the candidates as they fly around in circles from one battleground state to another, I also don’t understand why the candidates do it. The people that are coming to these rallies aren’t undecided voters — they are the ones that are certain to vote for the candidate anyway.
The only reason I can come up with is that the press would say the candidate had either given up or else was taking victory for granted if he wasn’t flying around the country like a crazy person until the last possible moment.
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:21 pm
This is a ridiculous argument. One of the most significant stories of this campaign, one highlighted on Matt’s site and those of numerous liberal bloggers, were the slurs shouted at Palin and McCain rallies. It was the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, a dumb sap who actually went on the plane as opposed to watching the campaign from the confines of his office, who first publicized this phenomenon. Then there’s the pool reports. I’m flashing back to Palin’s remark about being in “The Real America” which was brought up on many lefty blogs too. Where’d that come from? A trail reporter who attended a pooled fundraiser. It wasn’t televised. There is a lot of silly redundancy on campaign planes. But to argue that journalists just shouldn’t bother to travel with presidential candidates is sophomoric. Hard as it may be for some people to accept, you simply cannot find everything out just via Google and YouTube.
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I’m trying to think of a way of writing this without being as grossly offensive as “Somewhere” and “Don Williams.” I, too, was a little disappointed by Matt’s characterization of campaign reporting.
Essentially, Fred App nails it. Sure, we can quibble about how extensive the travel needs to be, but it’s a worthwhile investment to have reporters out there on those planes and buses with the candidates.
Where do you think the narrative about Palin being “rogue” comes from? What about the dispatches from the field, which give a glimpse into the crowds that show up for these candidates? How about having reporters there to verify the actual size of crowds at rallies (and not rely on padded figures from the campaign?
It’s tough to develop sources from the newsroom. Most often, you have to be out there and prod people for information. They’re just not going to give it to you.
And if newspapers simply cede covering the campaigns over to television, then they might as well close up the shop. If they’re not going to do any original reporting, then consumers really have little incentive to read the, say, Atlanta Journal-Constitution instead of this blog.
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Re Journalist’s comment “This is a ridiculous argument. One of the most significant stories of this campaign, one highlighted on Matt’s site and those of numerous liberal bloggers, were the slurs shouted at Palin and McCain rallies.”
————–
If Journalist is really a journalist, then this stupid shit argument makes the critics’ case far better than anything I could say.
The slur story was CHICKENSHIT! It was irrelevent! The REAL stories are the ones the stupidfuck journalists DON’T report.
Like asking John McCain why he could fuck the country out of $300 Billion in the 1989 Savings and Loan Disaster, spend 20 more years in the Senate and let the citizens be fucked out of $1.5 Trillion in the 2008 Wall Street disaster — and then claim he deserves our vote.
Like asking Hillary and the Democratic leadership if 4500 Americans have died in IRaq because the biggest Democratic contributor in 2000-2002 was a damm Israeli billionaire Haim Saban — who’s stated “I’m a one-issue man and that issue is Israel.”
Or maybe they could get around to examining what Bin Laden said was the REAL reasons Al Qaeda attacked the US on Sept 11 — and why both Parties and the 911 Commission conspired to cover up those causes. After it, it’s only been 7 damm years. Maybe the Victims’ families deserve to hear the real story.
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Don,
I think you largely disqualified yourself based on your response, but I’ll indulge you. The fact that a single reporter from each of a half-dozen news organizations is on the campaign plane does not preclude the other reporters in those organizations from covering other stories. Of course, what you’re talking about here generally wouldn’t be considered stories, but arguments. Nonetheless, nothing stopping them from being reported by other people.
And you may think the slur story was “chickenshit” but a lot of people didn’t. It raised some very legitimate concerns and probably helped fuel the backlash to the attacks on Obama that put him in his comfortable position in the polls today. All this is to my point — the internet triumphalism that otherwise marrs generally intelligent commentary on this site can lead people to forget that actual, on-the-ground, shoe leather reporting is important and can’t be duplicated. Even seemingly stupid traditions like traveling with candidates are there for a reason.
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Any campaign is a con game — a circus orchestrated to cover up any unpleasant truths and to put forth a midleading and deceitful facade.
Journalists think their jobs are to attend the circus and point out “Hey, There’s a Pony!” — and leave unaddressed the issue of who gets stuck with shoveling up the donkey and elephant shit.
Has anyone here seen any “journalist” investigating WHO in Congress fucked up and let this $1.5 Trillion financial disaster occur? Isn’t that something we deserve to know?
THe NY Times, bless its heart, did a few superficial stories but I seem to recall they mostly went with the “Tragic Great Man” schtick. AKA the McCain’s “Hang Chris Cox” line.
But past Congresses left a lot of muddy footprints –why is no one looking at that story and telling the citizens who shouldn’t be returned to Congress this election. Anyone seen any stories on Senator Bennett or Rep Jim Saxton, for example?
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:36 pm
This makes me think of the scene in the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” where Paul’s grandad (Wilfrid Brambell), after traveling with the boys for a while, complains that, “”So far I’ve been in a train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room!”
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:38 pm
One strange coincidence in the Financial disaster has been how all the “designated scapegoats” are officials who are not accountable to the voters. Alan Greenspan. Chris Cox. George W Bush. Paulson. Bernanke.
Which is Washington DC’s way of telling the plebes to bend over and enjoy –there’s nothing to be done. The fix is in. Just like it was in for the invasion of Iraq and for the $2 Trillion tax cut for the rich.
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:41 pm
The reason you pitch up every day is not to cover the boiler plate story that happens. It is for the one time out of 30 that something out of the ordinary happens.
Then you have to be there.
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Final “reporting” should be in quotes as well.
November 3rd, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I had one other question for “Journalist”:
Did you guys find Saddam’s nukes yet?
November 3rd, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Journalist, you’re attacking a straw man. Of course reporters should cover campaigns.
The question is whether big news outlets should pay through the nose to have the campaigns babysit the press. There are other ways to cover a campaign besides traveling with it. The major media companies don’t send just anyone on the bus. They send top talent who already have good sources. In this era Blackberries and email and commercial air travel, there’s really no reason to pay up to $3000 a day for your reporter to ride around on a bus. I guarantee that the sniping about Sarah Palin would have found its way into the media on way or the other.
You could put the same talent on the streets, or in the archives or, any number of places where they could actually report freely instead of being dependent on the campaign for everything.
The current setup gives the campaigns all the power. It’s expensive and it delivers a lousy product, which media outlets feel obliged to give top billing because they paid so much to make it.
November 3rd, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Most of the best evidence of hateful mobs at McCain/Palin rallies came from videographers and reporters who weren’t traveling with the campaign. A lot of these were alternative media types and/or members of the local press. They weren’t on the bus.
They were, by and large the kind of people who would never get on the bus in a million years both because their outlets couldn’t afford to send them and because the campaign wouldn’t have had them aboard.
While Dana Milbank’s account of someone yelling “kill him” at a Palin rally was a valuable addition, it wasn’t the best example of that kind of coverage and there’s no particular reason that Milbank had to have been traveling with the campaign in order to get that story.
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm
in theory local journalists at each location could do everything the travelling circus reporters do now–but the individual local journalists would be much harder to influence with fratboy stories and tasty snacks….
November 4th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Lindsay, I’m attacking the very thing you propose. If reporters were covering campaigns via blackberries, they would not get the sort of on-the-scene color I cited in my example. The local videographers’ material began to pour out AFTER the washington post column. And often it was of supporters outside, rather than inside, the rally, which is fish in a barrel and would have gained far less attention had people not established it was also happening inside. I don’t think buses need to be as crowded as they can be nowadays but Matt’s post implied that traveling with campaigns wasn’t real reporting, though it posed as such. That’s what I’m attacking.
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