August 5, 2007
The Birth of Modern Political Reporting Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:40 PM EST If you’ve been overwhelmed by the heavy traffic in presidential campaign coverage, as have I—with over a dozen candidates, at least six plausible contenders, and hundreds of print, electronic, and new-media outlets, it’s maddening—you might enjoy a tidbit I learned while reading Timothy Crouse’s classic volume The Boys on the Bus. Crouse was a writer for Rolling Stone who spent the 1971–1972 presidential cycle covering the people who covered the candidates—wire reporters, national political correspondents, magazine writers, network television correspondents, and the like. Among his most interesting observations was the shift in campaign coverage between 1968 and 1972. Prior to ’72, most journalists focused exclusively on the inside game—what the candidates were saying, which political bosses and interest groups were endorsing which contenders, and how internal party dynamics were shaping the field. But after a solid year of covering Eugene McCarthy’s unlikely triumph over Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, the surge in antiwar activity among grassroots Democrats, and the seeming inevitability of a realignment in national politics, many professional journalists were stunned when Richard Nixon, undoubtedly the most bland and evasive candidate in the 1968 field, managed to capture the Presidency. Crouse interviewed the veteran journalist Joseph Kraft, who (in Crouse’s words) “went on to argue that Presidential candidates like McCarthy, [Bobby] Kennedy and even Nelson Rockefeller, who campaigned among college kids and blacks, got all the coverage, while Richard Nixon, who made his pitch to ordinary Americans, ‘was almost entirely out of the news in the weeks before he walked off with the Republican nomination. . . . In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. [Kraft’s words].’” Enter Haynes Johnson, a veteran journalist with the Washington Post who, virtually alone among the reporters covering the ’72 race, spent little time on the candidates’ campaign buses and planes and instead devoted the better part of 18 months to tracking the opinion of the “middle Americans” who were thought to determine the outcome of national elections. With help from the electoral analyst Richard Scammon, the Washington Post identified 443 registered voters spaced out across 50 key precincts, and together with his colleague David Broder, Johnson tracked their opinions on a range of social and economic issues by way of formal surveys and informal interviews. “We wanted to chart the mood of the country over a period of years,” he explained, “so that when we got into the campaign we would really have something to base conclusions on. We would really have a sense of the major issues and what was moving people.” This brand of reporting, which Crouse termed “mood of America coverage,” and which critics tend to dismiss as pop sociology, later became standard fare in media treatment of presidential and congressional elections. Today, even regional newspapers and local newscasts hire pollsters to conduct focus groups, visit diners and office parks to gage the “sense of the people,” and interest themselves in what the voters are saying almost as much as in what the candidates are saying. Arguably, this sort of coverage enriched the larger universe of news reporting, as it recognized elections as political ecosystems rather than inside parlor games. It’s fascinating that the major outlets only discovered this methodology about 25 years ago.
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