In CJR Walter Pincus complains that “much of the news Americans get each day was created to serve just that purpose—to be the news of the day.” He also alludes to the fact that it is in the interest of most journalists to report such “news” as if it were not spoonfed to them, as if some muckraking or at the very least googling were involved in the process of information-gathering, as if they had not, in fact, arrived at this spot on the campaign bus with the implicit understanding that the government’s PR machine would be duly revered. Joan Didion’s 1988 piece “Insider Baseball” is the best account of this quid-pro-quo ever written:
On the day that Michael Dukakis appeared at the high school in Woodland Hills and at the rally in San Diego and in the school-yard in San Jose, there was, although it did not appear on the schedule, a fourth event, what was referred to among the television crews as a “tarmac arrival with ball tossing.” This event had taken place in late morning, on the tarmac at the San Diego airport, just after the chartered 737 had rolled to a stop and the candidate had emerged. There had been a moment of hesitation. Then baseball mitts had been produced, and Jack Weeks, the traveling press secretary, had tossed a ball to the candidate. The candidate had tossed the ball back. The rest of us had stood in the sun and given this our full attention, undeflected even by the arrival of an Alaska 767: some forty adults standing on a tarmac watching a diminutive figure in shirtsleeves and a red tie toss a ball to his press secretary.
“Just a regular guy,” one of the cameramen had said, his inflection that of the union official who confided, in an early Dukakis commercial aimed at blue-collar voters, that he had known “Mike” a long time, and backed him despite his not being “your shot-and-beer kind of guy.”
“I’d say he was a regular guy,” another cameraman had said. “Definitely.”
“I’d sit around with him,” the first cameraman said.
…not until I read Joe Klein’s version of these days in California did it occur to me that this eerily contrived moment on the tarmac at San Diego could become, at least provisionally, history. “The Duke seemed downright jaunty,” Joe Klein reported. “He tossed a baseball with aides. He was flagrantly multilingual. He danced Greek dances….” In the July 25 issue of U.S. News & World Report, Michael Kramer opened his cover story, “Is Dukakis Tough Enough?” with a more developed version of the ball tossing:
“The thermometer read 101 degrees, but the locals guessed 115 on the broiling airport tarmac in Phoenix. After all, it was under a noonday sun in the desert that Michael Dukakis was indulging his truly favorite campaign ritual—a game of catch with his aide Jack Weeks. “These days,” he has said, “throwing the ball around when we land somewhere is about the only exercise I get.” For 16 minutes, Dukakis shagged flies and threw strikes. Halfway through, he rolled up his sleeves, but he never loosened his tie. Finally, mercifully, it was over and time to pitch the obvious tongue-in-cheek question: “Governor, what does throwing a ball around in this heat say about your mental stability?” Without missing a beat, and without a trace of a smile, Dukakis echoed a sentiment he has articulated repeatedly in recent months: ‘What it means is that I’m tough.’”Nor was this the last word. On July 31 in The Washington Post, David S. Broder, who had also been with the Dukakis campaign in Phoenix, gave us a third, and, by virtue of his seniority in the process, perhaps the official version of the ball tossing:
“Dukakis called out to Jack Weeks, the handsome, curly-haired Welshman who good-naturedly shepherds us wayward pressmen through the daily vagaries of the campaign schedule. Weeks dutifully produced two gloves and a baseball, and there on the tarmac, with its surface temperature just below the boiling point, the governor loosened up his arm and got the kinks out of his back by tossing a couple hundred 90-foot pegs to Weeks.”
Didion makes quite clear that anyone who notes the fact of the set-up would be considered pitiably naive. Such a person would seem not to understand what a privilege it is to convey the news that a campaign wants conveyed, how hard these men have worked to be part of this bus-bound elite, how lucky they all are to be witnessing this or that photo op, how their very presence is validation of their superior intelligence and exceptional reportorial capacities. Like my friend Dan Akst, I don’t know that any of this has much to do with the death of newspapers. But it does say something about the redundancy of most political reporting; we can all just as easily read the press releases online.
[...] — The eye-deep corruption of political journalism. [...]
It’s a good thing nothing’s riding on these charades. I’ve always more or less suspected something like this, but figured these “giants” would be a good deal more circumspect. Thanks for setting me straight.
My current operating theory is that our political press people have no souls, and like all people who lack souls, “know” that all of us engaged in politics also lack souls. This is how they “know” that trying to defend the Constitution against Republicans and Democrats who eroding it are engaging in partisan vengeance: it is the only way it makes any sense to people without souls. It would never occur to them that such defense is pan-partisan / non-partisan, sincere and important. They themselves have no sincere sense of caring about “their” nation or its citizens. It’s all about who’s winning and who’s losing right now, and knowing that no matter what, they themselves are the knowing winners.
I don’t know how this affects Didion’s article, which I’ve always loved, but the Duke still throws a baseball with little league kids, at least as of a summer ago.
That still gets to the problem of political reporting; even if that’s true and was true of Dukakis, there was no way to get the press to report it without a transparently fake set-up. Of course, when Gore tried the same type of thing to highlight his accomplishments, they turned on him because they didn’t want to report that he was as accomplished as he was.
I have to say this much for Obama; you can’t fake or stage a 3-pointer.