Richard Nixon and the lessons of Boys on the Bus still haunt us
Journalism would do well to heed Boys on the Bus's actual lessons.
Photo via Flickr.
A new, regular feature of The Gonzo Primary: a look at journalism and the press, past and present. SUBSCRIBE for regular updates.
There was a bit of a surreal moment at the Campaign Journalism Conference in Chicago in April when CNN political editor Sam Feist held up the book Boys on the Bus, the seminal work by Timothy Crouse that followed the press corps assigned to the 1972 primary campaign.
It wasn’t so much that Feist, or anyone else, should recommend the work—it’s that Feist’s network, CNN, is the antithesis of any lesson that you could glean from the book. Somehow, through the years, the boozy, drug-addled absurdity and community formed by of much of the press corps is what is remembered about Boys on the Bus.
But that isn’t what the book is about.
Instead, Boys on the Bus dismantles the way the press operates as an institution. A generation later, we still haven’t heeded its lessons. CNN in particular is a leader in the type of horse race caricature the press draws of any given campaign, giving candidates (particularly Trump) endless free media exposure with little exploration or understanding of how an electorate should contemplate its vote.
Since I actually read the thing recently, it was eerie how little has changed and how the echoes of 1972—unrest in the streets, a roiling civil rights movement, Vietnam—feels perfectly prescient.
More directly, though, Crouse dissects how the press managed to prop up a failed Democratic lightweight, George McGovern, despite the fact that most covering him knew that they were playing their part in his dog and pony show. Meanwhile, an embattled Richard Nixon—facing a cloud of anger on the left from the Vietnam War and the still-brewing Watergate scandal—managed to run a non-campaign, avoiding press scrutiny almost entirely. With the press’s help, he won anyway.
The big lessons as I see them that the press might heed (but, yes, likely won’t) this time around:
Objectivity ≠ Truth
Brit Hume (yes, that Brit Hume) used to work for a well-known muckraking columnist named Jack Anderson, who was once the only reporter in Washington known as a fearless digger for pay-to-play politics and sensational scoops (before his fall from grace).
As Hume says in Boys on the Bus:
Those guys on the [campaign] plane claim that they’re trying to be objective. They shouldn’t try to be objective, they should try to be honest. And they’re not being honest. Their so-called objectivity is just a guise for superficiality. They report what one candidate said, they go and report what the other candidate said with equal credibility. They never get around to finding out if the guy is telling the truth … What they pass off as objectivity is just a mindless kind of neutrality.
II. Coverage ≠ Real Insight
This is something that has gotten a lot better over the years. There is a lot of good journalism, especially at the bigger outlets, spent trying to figure out who the candidates are, what their backgrounds mean or should signify for voters.
But covering anybody’s day-to-day campaign grind doesn’t reveal much about much if journalists don’t draw some conclusions.
On June 1, a normal campaign day, the reporters had gained no fresh insights into George McGovern; they had not gone out of their way to look for any. They had not tried to find out whether the large sums of money that were suddenly pouring into the campaign coffers had changed the candidate; or whether the prospect of the nomination, now so close at hand, was tempting him to bend on some of his more controversial stand s… “We spent tons of ink on that guy,” one of the reporters later lamented, “and I’d be willing to bet that on the night he got the nomination we hadn’t told anybody in the United States who the hell we were talking about, what kind of man he was.”
III. Fuck scoops and access.
What becomes clear from the book is that Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t ruin the White House press briefing—Nixon’s White House press secretary Ron Ziegler did . Former Newsweek journalist Ron Fleming finally figured out that promises of access and keeping up a good relationship with sources in the White House was all a game meant to divide and conquer the press. It worked and it still does.
“It doesn’t make any difference if you’re fucked or you’re not fucked,” said Fleming. “You delude yourself into thinking, ‘well if I get onto the bad side of these guys, then I’m not gonna get all that good stuff.’ But pretty soon the realization hits that there isn’t any good stuff, and there isn’t gonna be any good stuff. Nobody’s getting anything that you’re not getting, and if they are it’s just more of the same bullshit.
I loved this anecdote from Stuart Loory, a Los Angeles Times reporter who had also been a reporter in Moscow.
“I found great similarities between covering the White House and the Kremlin,” he said later. “When the Kremlin was unhappy with you, they shut you out. They didn’t invite you to the press conferences. They didn’t let you travel.”
IV. Freedom ≠ Free
Crouse assumed that TV networks didn’t challenge campaigns because executives were probably afraid to piss off candidates or campaigns and thus lose access. That wasn’t really the case. He found out by following reporters around that deadlines in those days were so tight that even editors didn’t have time to substantially review what reporters filed.
So, essentially, the reporters on the ground had complete freedom to report on the campaign as they saw fit. Instead of liberating them to describe what was happening on the ground, it had the opposite effect.
‘Freedom’ scared a reporter out of his mind, because it wasn’t really freedom at all. ‘Freedom’ simply meant that nobody had marked the pitfalls and booby traps, so the reporter became cautious as a blind man on a battlefield. A network correspondent worried about 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 … if a reporter fumbled a story, the shit-hammer came down squarely on his head. There were no middlemen to blame.
V. Front-runner = Bullshit
Before the first votes are cast, let’s remember this primary season is mostly a show for the media. Take it from David Broder, the old scion of the national campaign press corps for The Washington Post. Broder in his day was so respected that Crouse wrote that he was one of the few who could print out a newsletter in his basement and people would still buy it as if it were the Post.
Anyway, heed the old words of Broder: front-runner is a bullshit term … and there are no lessons to be learned from previous campaigns.
“I will be an old fart for a minute,” Broder said cheerfully, “and tell you that the most distressing thing about covering politics is that the guy who was absolutely right, whose wisdom was almost breathtaking one election—you go back to that same man for wisdom some other year and he’ll be as dumb as dogshit. That’s why it’s not a science. You can say, ‘in 1968, I learned the following key lessons, which I’m going to write down in the front of my notebook and look at them twice a day all day through 1972’—and you’ll get absolutely deceived by doing all that.’
Crouse then described that Broder had devoted too much space to the wrong candidates in 1972.
Broder says,
The one thing I’ll say in my defense, is that I repeatedly wrote, ‘Front runner is a meaningless term.’ There’s a lawyer named Matt Gwritzman who works for McGovern, and I keep cribbing his law of politics, and his first law of Presidential politics is that nothing that happens before the first Presidential primary really has any relevance at all.”
All that history and doomed to repeat mantra feels especially true right now. In Columbia Journalism Review, Todd Gitlin makes the case that the media played a big part in helping to elect Trump by giving him lots of free airtime and equating Hillary Clinton’s misdeeds with his. In hindsight, it’s easy to moralize or to shrug off the press’s role in 2016, especially because the two candidates evoked such strong hatred that crossed traditional political lines.
Either way, Gitlin backs up well that, at the very least, the coverage was skewed to the point of inaccuracy. Reporters are terrified of the charge of liberal bias and often overplay their hand in the other direction when the opportunity presents itself. Ironically, that might extend to CJR itself—full disclosure: I have worked and written stories for CJR—who appointed its own public watchdogs for major media networks, with the exception of Fox News. Fox, of course, has the biggest cable audience and will play perhaps the most important role of any news media outlet this election cycle given its sway with President Trump and conservatives generally.
If I learned anything at that CJC Chicago conference it’s that the press learned little that it takes seriously from 2016, despite all the hand wringing; to Broder’s point, those lessons might not even apply.
So, the press, as an institution, will do what it does until November 2020—cover the candidates through the bias of their sources—those who are paid by the various camps and political parties and see winning as the only goal; tout the latest poll numbers as gospel; give airtime to those who deliver the most pointed broadsides; spend hours with pundits in little boxes yelling at each other.
I don’t have a one sentence answer to alleviate these problems, other than to say that we better start talking about them or we are doomed to having to keep learning lessons from books written 50 years ago.