Matthew Yglesias:
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.
Idiot. You wouldn't be able to watch the rally on TV if it
weren't for the TV crews following the campaign. And while it
could be argued that there is wasted manpower in the
pack-journalism of a big presidential campaign trip,
nevertheless, the blogger -- or other news consumer -- benefits
from the opportunity to see events through multiple pairs of
eyes. If the candidate gives a 2,000-word speech, which 25-word
quote is the most important? Aren't reporters who've been
following the campaign for several days best qualified to notice
what's new in today's speech?
As someone who does both blogging and reporting, I appreciate the
value of reporting. One of my big beefs about journalism today is
the perverse esteem given to pundits who've never done
first-source reporting. There is a lamentable tendency to take
for granted the people who do the basic 5Ws-and-an-H stuff, while
idolizing the "big picture" guy telling us What It Means. (Hey,
just give me the facts and let me worry about the meaning.)
There are competing tendencies in presidential campaign
reporting. Local press tends to be straightforward about what the
candidate said -- to quote the speech as a meaningful expression
of the candidate's positions -- and to supply lots of quotes from
local supporters about how great it is to have the candidate in
town. The traveling national press corps is more concerned with
the topline narrative of what the candidate's strategy is and how
well (or how poorly) the strategy seems to be working. My own
forays onto the campaign trail have been episodic, and I've tried
to use each event -- the quotes from candidates and supporters,
the "color" details -- to supply some particular insight into the
campaign.
However reporting is done, or by whom, there is simply no
substitute for direct observation. If you didn't see and hear
Republican crowds go wild when the "Straight Talk Express" bus
rolled into an arena with "Eye of the Tiger" blasting from the
speakers, if you didn't talk with the folks who turned out for
those rallies, you can't claim to know who these people are, or
what their moods and motivations are. Some things simply can't be
done by watching TV and reading transcripts.
