2008 Election

Politico: Reporters Have No Access on Campaign Trail

By Maegan Carberry ⋅ September 18, 2008 ⋅   Email this post ⋅  Digg This ⋅  Share on Facebook ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Politico has an interesting story today on how news orgs are apparently wasting big bucks traveling with Obama and McCain to limited results:

“Not only do the reporters have little interaction with the candidates, but increasingly they are having little impact on the broad campaign narratives and daily story lines that supply most voters with their impressions of the candidates.

That’s more often taking place in cable studios or on Web sites far removed from the ceaseless grind of the press bubble — in which reporters schlump on and off the plane, in and out of buses and gymnasiums-turned-filing centers, several times a day, dozens of times a week.

… So reporters gripe among themselves, wondering why their news organizations pay tens of thousands of dollars to be shut out.

Officials of both campaigns said they had become exasperated with what they consider the petty controversies or insider minutia that is the obsession of the on-the-plane reporters, and didn’t want to take a chance of creating a story that would override the story they were trying to tell with their staged, scripted events.

… The campaigns’ thinking: They get their message out to local voters, and the questions are rarely hard-hitting. And the interviews are more likely to be about issues or local color, rather than the political conflict that consumes national reporters.

This spotty access is one of the key ways that bloggers and new-media outlets have undermined the ability of traditional organizations to set and drive the campaign narrative.”

I’m not sure that use of the word “undermined” is appropriate here with respect to the blogosphere, nor would it necessarily be a negative given the major failures of MSM to uncover the truth is such important instances as invading Iraq.