quotes & notes from
The Boys on the Bus
by
Timothy Crouse

But they all fed off the same pool report, the same daily handout, the same speech by the candidate; the whole pack was isolated in the same mobile village. After a while, they began to believe the same rumors, subscribe to the same theories, and write the same stories.

Everybody denounces pack journalism, including the men who form the pack.

Most American newspapers—at least 85 percent—are owned by conservative Republicans and regularly endorse Republican candidates. The greatest cross that these owners have to bear is that most reporters are Democrats.

The campaign day was drawing to a dreary close. Had all the events taken place in a single room, the reporters would have been climbing the walls with boredom by mid-afternoon. It was the bus rides and plane flights, the sense that a small army was being efficiently deployed, that had given the day its pace, variety, and excitement. Yet the reporters seldom wrote about this traveling around, which was so important in forming their gut feelings about the campaign.

As for the candidate, he was usually accessible for news conferences or informal chats throughout the trip. Truman even played poker with the boys; one of them [...] lost four hundred dollars to the President in one afternoon and had to make it up by padding his expense account for the next few months.

As recently as 1960, or even 1964, a coalition of party heavies, state conventions, and big-city bosses had chosen the candidate in relatively unviolated privacy, and then presented him to the press to report on.

Now the press screened the candidates, usurping the party’s old function. By reporting a man’s political strengths, they made him a front runner; by mentioning his weaknesses and liabilities, they cut him down. [...] The press was no longer simply guessing who might run and who might win; the press was in some way determining these things.

But I remember the gist of what Naughton said, and he has since repeated the rest for me.

“When I was in Cleveland and I was a young political reporter—fairly naive, fairly idealistic, fairly liberal—there was a state representative [...] A man of immense charm. Seemed to me to represent what was right, what was the future. I thought he would make one helluva mayor. And my news stories may have reflected that, and I’m sure my columns did. And that may or may not have helped get him elected.

“And as soon as he got elected, he turned around and shat on all the people who had worked their asses off for him. He was just a bastard. He had terminal ego. And that convinced me you should never place your trust in a politician.”

Quite naturally, this first batch of McGovern reporters had not written in great detail about McGovern’s proposals; they were lucky to get enough space to describe the day-to-day progress of McGovern’s campaign. The band of ex-Muskie regulars who took over in May had a different problem. Coming in late, they had to learn about the workings of the McGovern campaign as quickly as possible. They had no time to study his more complicated proposals. Thus, neither group of reporters was able to give McGovern the careful scrutiny he deserved, and which might have saved him from making disastrous mistakes later on.

“Politicians are different from you and me,” Reeves went on, apropos of McGovern. “The business of reaching for power does something to a man—it closes him off from other men until, day by day, he reaches the point where he instinctively calculates each new situation and each other man with the simplest question: what can this do for me?” Reeves saw that McGovern was a politician, and he predicted the compromises that McGovern would make with party regulars later in the year.

John Lindsay was a fixture of political journalism, a sensitive and observant man who was deeply dissatisfied with the world and had cultivated a cynical manner to deal with all the hypocrisy that he saw. [...] He grew up in a small Massachusetts town and entered politics for a few weeks in his youth, managing a losing campaign for a man who wanted to be state representative from Milford, Mass. “I had a job digging graves at the time, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to vote anybody from the cemetery,” he said. “It was a clear indication that I wasn’t cut out for politics.”

“I don’t think people ought to believe only one news medium,” Walter Cronkite told an interviewer during the Republican Convention. “They ought to read and they ought to go to opinion journals and all the rest of it. I think it’s terribly important that this be taught in the public schools, because otherwise, we’re gonna get to a situation because of economic pressures and other things where television’s all you’ve got left. And that would be disastrous.”

The TV reporters were the direct descendants of Nathaniel Currier and James Ives, the pioneers of American pictorial journalism. In 1860, Currier and Ives mass-produced cheap, accurate prints (sold at corner newsstands) of Lincoln, Douglas, and Breckinridge. For the first time, the public knew exactly what the candidates looked like. The Currier and Ives operation was a wild success, and it was based on the principle that would become the cardinal rule of TV news: “Don’t just tell a story, show it.”

TV journalists weren’t quite the easy riders that Eaton made them out to be. In the world of straight, “objective” journalism, the more freedom you gave a reporter, the more he censored himself. “Freedom” scared a reporter out of his mind, because it wasn’t really freedom at all. “Freedom” simply meant that nobody had clearly marked all the pitfalls and booby traps, so the reporter became cautious as a blind men on a battlefield. A network correspondent worried about the FCC breathing down his neck, he prayed that he wouldn’t cross some little quirk of the network-news president, and he thought of all the money he was pissing away [...] To say that TV reporting was an “individual thing” was to say that if a reporter fumbled a story, the shit-hammer came down squarely on his head. There were no middlemen to blame.

But as I walked away from the press trailer that night, slightly shaken, it occurred to me that the networks regarded themselves as omnipotent and sacred institutions, roughly like the Presidency.

Maybe the correspondents didn’t, but the corporate heavies did. Later in the year, I would come across the same mammoth PR operation, the same desire to classify the most trivial and worthless information, the same arrogance, and the same mindless lickspittle respect for any higher executive—at the White House, of course.