OxBlog

Saturday, May 08, 2004

# Posted 12:27 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

ACADEMICS AND AMATEURS: This afternoon, my institute -- the one I belong to, not the one I own -- hosted a discussion with Boston Globe political correspondent Patrick Healy. The subject of the discussion was "National Security and Campaign 2004". I was the moderator, which meant that I had to wear a jacket and tie.

Going into the discussion, I had no idea what to expect. I'd never met Patrick before and hadn't read much of his work until I spent a couple of hours reading his articles on Lexis-Nexis the night before. I'd invited him to speak because the Globe is our hometown paper and he is its lead correspondent on the Kerry campaign. I'd hoped to have their Bush correspondent come as well, but a last minute schedule change by the White House kept her away.

When I first saw Patrick in person, I was surprised at how young he looked. Now, I guess that's a funny thing to say since he's older than I am. But the firm authority with which jounralists write makes you want to believe that they are all grizzled professionals. Once Patrick started talking, however, he immediately began to seem more authoritative without abandoning the humility that makes you want to be his friend rather than take him down a notch.

Patrick opened up the dicussion by talking for about 10 minutes about where the Kerry campaign is now. The rest of the hour and a half was all Q&A. So when I say that I didn't know what to expect, that had as much to do with not knowing what kind of questions the audience would ask as with not knowing how Patrick would answer them. At first, I was concerned that Patrick wasn't making a good impression because so few hands went up when I opened the floor to questions. But after just a short while, it became clear that the audience was quiet because it was spellbound, not because it was bored.

The audience consisted of advanced grad students, mid-career diplomats and government officials spending a year at Harvard, institute staff, and a couple of faculty members. All together, there were around 20 of us. Patrick opened up by saying that the Kerry campaign was approaching a turning point. After the medal-throwing story broke a couple of weeks ago, Kerry became enraged and shut himself off from the press. After the ABC interview that started it all, Kerry said he was sick of journalists "doing the bidding of the RNC". But now, Kerry is set to resurface with a major press conference in the next couple of days.

Taking a broader look, Patrick said he thinks there hasn't been a lot of substantive debate about Kerry's foreign policy. One reason for that the Vietnam story line has become overwhelming. Kerry plays endlessly on his war record, so it is always the issue. Of course, journalists are complicit in that process.

I think the best way to describe the Q&A with Patrick is that it was like an introduction to blogging. The audience asked all those questions that I only began to ask once I started blogging and backseat journalism became my profession.

After hearing how journalists actually travel on the same bus as the candidate day after day after day, one of my colleagues very earnestly asked whether developing a relationship with the candidate and depending on him for information makes it harder to criticize.

Patrick he didn't think he'd really pulled any punches, but he talked about one of the other correspondents who wanted to do a feature on Teresa Heinz Kerry and wound up turning in an unremittingly positive profile that his editor rejected because it didn't cover any of the official negative storylines about her, such as concerns that she is a loose cannon or out of touch with the American mainstream.

At that point, I was thinking to myself that both Patrick and my colleague had missed half of the story, if not more. While journalists may depend on candidates for information, candidates depend on journalists for coverage. With few exceptions, candidates simply have to accept what journalists write and keep on working with them. The more influential the publication, the more this relationship favors the journalists.

At one point, in order to illustrate the dependence of journalists on the candidates they cover, Patrick described how Kerry's staff once distributed a major policy proposal in advance to the NYT, the WaPo, the WSJ and (I think) CNN. When all those papers got their stories out ahead of Patrick's, he got pretty angry and called the campaign staff to complain. At first they told them that if they'd given him the proposal, they would have had to give it to all of the correspondents for the big regional papers.

Patrick said that was bullsh**, since the Globe is Kerry's hometown paper and it had been covering him when no one else was. The staffer responded that Kerry may have needed the Globe before New Hampshire, but now he was running a national campaign. Besides, the Globe had always been far harsher on Kerry than the other papers, and you don't win points for that.

From my perspective, the moral of that story was that the NYT, WaPo et al. have tremendous influence over the candidate, probably more than he has over them. But no one in the audience saw it that way.

In general, both the questions and answers during the Q&A began from the implicit premise that the job of journalists is to prevent the candidates from distorting the truth. As such, the real danger is not that journalists will be excessively judgmental or critical, but that they will be too soft. There was no sense on either side of the table that perhaps there needs to be someone who watches over the journalists.

The one audience member was one man with a white beard who seemed perpetually agitated. He scribbled constant notes on a pad in front of him and was wearing a sweater that only made it half-way down from his neckline to his waist. His canvas tote-bag had "concerned liberal" written all over it. (Figuratively.) His was the one question that came from someone who had clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the media and its problems.

The question he asked, as one might have guessed from his tote-bag, was why the mainstream media invested so little effort in researching Bush's lackadaisical attendance at National Guard training sessions. Now, I would've phrased the question as "Why does the media pay attention to Bush's service record in sporadic bursts rather than trying to resolve the issue once and for all?" Still, it was a good question.

Patrick offered a number of answers. First, the Globe had done more than any other paper on the subject. Second, no new documents were coming out of the White House because there was no public pressure on at the moment. Third, Bush is an incumbent, so you don't need to infer how he will act as commander-in-chief from something he did more than thirty years ago.

Now, answer one is true, but it doesn't say anything about other papers' inconsistent coverage of the subject. Answer three suggests no one will ever pay attention to the issue, so it can't explain why sometimes it becomes front-page news. And answer two just begs the question of why public pressure suddenly comes and goes. At least in the case of Bush's service record, the answer is the media. Peter Jennings made it an issue by asking Wes Clark about Michael Moore's AWOL charge. There was a flurry of attention, but the story died once Kerry's victory in the primaries hit page one.

The question I was left asking myself after the debate was what questions I might have asked if I had been in the audience but hadn't been a blogger. Probably exactly the same ones that the actual audience asked. They were intelligent. They solicited important information from the guest. But from the perspective of a blogger-slash-backseat journalist, they seemed so elementary. And that made me realize just how much I had learned by spending a couple of hours a day on this website for the last eighteen months

It also made me realize how specialized and pedantic bloggers' media criticism is. Even the most intelligent "normal" people out there have only the vaguest sense of how bloggers read the newspaper. Much like scholars, bloggers tend to think of their analytical methods as being a secret treasure, while critics think of them as the product of some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Yet in contrast to scholars, bloggers are rapidly winning bigger and bigger audiences.

Bloggers are also getting the attention of those they criticize. In contrast, politicians ignore what political scientists write (while obsessing about the media). If Instapundit gets more than 100,000 hits a day, how long is it before blog-style thinking becomes mainstream among the one or two million voters who are really well-informed?

The final thought I had about today's discussion was that if I can look back on myself from two years and say "Oh my God, I can't believe how ignorant I was!", who might look at me now and say "Oh my God, I can't believe how ignorant he is!" Would it be the soldiers who read what I have to say about Iraq? The officials at State and DoD who might laugh at my primitive concept of how policymaking works? Or the journalists who marvel at how much arrogant advice and allegedly constructive criticism comes from someone who hasn't written edited a newspaper since high school?

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

Comments: Post a Comment


Home