Late last week, national media outlets won an access-related battle when the Obama campaign agreed to allow a small group of reporters -- called a "protective pool" -- to track all of the candidate's movements. On Saturday, the Sun-Times' Lynn Sweet posted the first pool report since the decision and it provides an interesting glimpse into the life of a campaign correspondent.
The dispatch (written up by the Wall Street Journal's Amy Chozick) spans seven hours, during which the reporters hang out on a wall across the street from Obama's Chicago house, discover said wall is covered in fire ants, follow him to the gym, follow him back to his house, follow him to a restaurant downtown, wait outside said restaurant for 2.5 hours, then follow him back home, before calling it a day.
The utter monotony of this pool report reminded me of Nation Washington editor Chris Hayes' valuable thoughts on campaign coverage last year:
Typically, papers assign a reporter to cover a certain candidate, and that reporter spends all day, every day, following the candidate around: going from photo-op to speech to photo-op and hoping to squeeze in some face-time in between. It’s an awful existence, I think. I first got an inkling of this when working as an organizer in Madison, WI during the final days of the Kerry campaign. I went to a big Kerry rally and saw the haggard press corps straggle in after him and sit with their lap-tops listening to a stump speech that by that point they must have heard 100+ times. So, if you’re in that position what do you do? If you sit through endless, mind-numbing hours listening to the candidate spew the same safe inanities, you inevitably start to snoop around for new “angles”. John Kerry has a butler! There are lots of kids on the trail! Al Gore sighed during the debate! The point is that all of this trivial bullshit is just a natural outgrowth of the need to break up the sheer monotony of the campaign.
Then there’s the additional problem that the longer a reporter spends with a campaign, the more likely they’ll develop either a kind of contempt for the candidate and the campaign or a strange version of stockholm syndrome. Clearly this was the case during 2000 and 2004 when the dislike for both Gore and Kerry was palpable. This might be natural and human, but it breeds awful journalism.
Chris goes on to prescribe a few possible solutions to this problem.
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