The Boys on the Bus Page 2

  It was just these womblike conditions that gave rise to the notorious phenomenon called “pack journalism” (also known as “herd journalism” and “fuselage journalism”). A group of reporters were assigned to follow a single candidate for weeks or months at a time, like a pack of hounds sicked on a fox. Trapped on the same bus or plane, they ate, drank, gambled, and compared notes with the same bunch of colleagues week after week.

  Actually, this group was as hierarchical as a chess set. The pack was divided into cliques—the national political reporters, who were constantly coming and going; the campaign reporters from the big, prestige papers and the ones from the small papers; the wire-service men; the network correspondents; and other configurations that formed according to age and old Washington friendships. The most experienced national political reporters, wire men, and big-paper reporters, who were at the top of the pecking order, often did not know the names of the men from the smaller papers, who were at the bottom. But they all fed off the same pool report, the same daily handout, the same speech by the candidate; the whole pack was isolated in the same mobile village. After a while, they began to believe the same rumors, subscribe to the same theories, and write the same stories.

  Everybody denounces pack journalism, including the men who form the pack. Any self-respecting journalist would sooner endorse incest than come out in favor of pack journalism. It is the classic villain of every campaign year. Many reporters and journalism professors blame it for everything that is shallow, obvious, meretricious, misleading, or dull in American campaign coverage.

  On a muggy afternoon during the California primary campaign, I went to consult with Karl Fleming, a former political reporter and Los Angeles bureau chief for Newsweek, who was rumored to be a formidable critic of pack journalism. Fleming was beginning a whole new gig as editor of a fledgling semi-underground paper called LA; I found him in dungarees and shirtsleeves, sitting behind a desk that was covered with the makings of LA’s pilot issue.† He was a ruggedly built North Carolinian with the looks and accent to play Davy Crockett in a Disney remake. He was very busy putting his magazine together, taking phone calls, and giving instructions to one long-haired writer after another, but he seemed to enjoy letting off steam about political journalism. One of the reasons he quit Newsweek was that he got fed up riding around on campaign extravaganzas.

  “I got so frustrated during the Nixon campaign in 1968,” he grinned, “that I went to Ron Ziegler one day—we were flying some-goddam-where—and said, ‘Ron, I come to you as a representative of the press corps to ask you this question.’ I said, ‘The question is, What does Nixon do upon the occasion of his semiannual erection?’ Ziegler never cracked a goddam smile. Then I said, ‘The consensus is that he smuggles it to Tijuana.’ ”

  Fleming leaned back in his chair and laughed hard.

  “Gee,” I said, “you must have been fucked after that.”

  “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 on 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 told Fleming that I was puzzled as to why so many newspapers felt they needed to have correspondents aboard the press bus; a couple of wire-service guys and a camera crew should be able to cover a candidate’s comings, goings, and official statements more than thoroughly.

  “Papers that have enough money are not content to have merely the AP reports,” said Fleming. “They want to have their own person in Washington because it means prestige for the paper and because in a curious way, it gives the editors a feeling of belonging to the club, too. I’ll guarantee you that three fourths of the goddam stuff—the good stuff—that the Washington press corps reporters turn up never gets into print at all. The reason it’s collected is because it’s transmitted back to the editor, to the publisher, to the ‘in’ executive cliques on these newspapers and networks and newsmagazines. It’s sent in confidential FYI memos or just over the phone. You give the publisher information that his business associates or his friends at the country club don’t have; you’re performing a very valuable function for him, and that, by God, is why you get paid.

  “But while these papers want to have a guy there getting all the inside stuff, they don’t want reporters who are ballsy enough and different enough to make any kind of trouble. It would worry the shit out of them if their Washington reporter happened to come up with a page-one story that was different from what the other guys were getting. And the first goddam thing that happens is they pick up the phone and call this guy and say, ‘Hey, if this is such a hot story, how come AP or the Washington Post doesn’t have it?’ And the reporter’s in big fuckin’ trouble. The editors don’t want scoops. Their abiding interest is making sure that nobody else has got anything that they don’t have, not getting something that nobody else has.

  “So eventually a very subtle kind of thing takes over and the reporter says to himself, ‘All I gotta do to satisfy my editor and publisher is just get what the other guys are getting, so why should I bust my ass?’ And over a period of a few years he joins the club. Now, most of these guys are honest, decent reporters who do the best job they can in this kind of atmosphere. The best reporters are the ones who sit around and talk about what assholes their editors and publishers are, and that still happens, thank God, with a great amount of frequency, even at the high levels of the Washington press corps.

  “All the same, any troublemaking reporter who walks into a press conference and asks a really mean snotty question which is going to make the candidate and his people really angry is going to be treated like a goddam pariah. ’Cause these guys in this club, they don’t want any troublemakers stirring up the waters, which means they might have to dig for something that’s not coming down out of the daily handout, or coming in from the daily pool report about what went on. They’d rather sit around the pressroom at the hotel every night, drinking booze and playing poker.”

  Fleming said that in June, and as I followed the press through the next five months of the campaign, I discovered that some of his accusations checked out, but others did not. Almost everything he said held true for the White House press corps,‡ but his charges did not always apply to the men who covered the Democratic candidates in 1972. It was true that some editors were still reluctant to run a story by their own man until the wire services had confirmed it. It was true that newsmagazine reporters and network correspondents occasionally leaked part of a hot story to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal; after the story had gained respectability by appearing in one of these major establishment organs, the correspondent would write the whole story for his own organization. And it was impossible to tell how often the reporters censored themselves in anticipation of some imaginary showdown with a cautious editor, preferring to play it safe and go along with whatever the rest of the pack was writing.

  But things had also begun to change since Fleming’s campaign stories in 1968. The men on the bus had more authority and independence than ever before, and many of them were searching for new ways to report on the freakish, insular existence of the press bus, and for ways to break away from the pack. Very few of them filed any confidential memos to their superiors, or phoned in any inside information, except to suggest that such information might be worked up into a story.

  Take, for example, the case of Curtis Wilkie, a young reporter for the Wilmington, Delaware News-Journal whom I met for the first time on the morning of June 1. I walked out of the lobby of the Wilshire Hyatt House, past all the black Nauga-hide furniture, and stepped into the first of the two silver buses that were waiting at the curb. It was the kind of bus to which most bus-fanciers would give three stars—the windows were tinted and there was a toilet in the rear, bu
t the seats did not recline. The time was 7:30 A.M. and two-thirds of the seats were already filled with silent and bleary-eyed reporters who looked as cheerful as a Georgia chain gang on its way to a new roadbed. Most of them were sending out powerful “No Trespassing” vibes. My company was in no great demand, word having gotten around that I was researching an article on the press. Reporters snapped their notebooks shut when I drew near. The night before, Harry Kelly, a tall, hard-eyed Irishman from the Hearst papers, had looked at me over his shoulder and muttered, “Goddam gossip columnist.”

  I finally sat down next to a thirtyish dark-haired reporter wearing a Palm Beach suit and a drooping moustache, who looked too hungover to object to my presence. After a long silence, he spoke up in a twangy Southern accent and introduced himself as Curtis Wilkie. He was from Mississippi and had been a senior at Ole Miss in 1964 when General Walker led his famous charge on the administration building. After graduating, Wilkie had put in seven years as a reporter on the Clarksdale, Mississippi Register (circ. 7,000), and, as I later found out, had won a slew of journalism prizes. In 1968, he had gone to the Chicago Convention as a member of the “loyalist” Mississippi delegation and had cast his vote for Eugene McCarthy. Soon after that, he won a Congressional fellowship and worked for Walter Mondale in the Senate and John Brademas in the House. In 1971, the Wilmington paper hired him as its main political writer; they got their money’s worth, for he wrote two separate 750-word articles every day, a “hard” news story for the morning News and a “soft” feature story for the afternoon Journal

  “Last night, I filed a story unconditionally predicting that the Hump’s gonna get rubbed out in the primary,” he said. Now he was worried that his editors might object to so firm a stand, or that Humphrey, through some terrible accident, might win. As if to reassure himself, Wilkie kept telling funny, mordant stories about the last-ditch hysterics of the Humphrey campaign.

  Wilkie had experienced a few bad moments over a Humphrey story once before. During the Pennsylvania primary, Humphrey unwisely decided to hold a student rally at the University of Pennsylvania. The students booed and heckled, calling Humphrey “Americas Number 2 War Criminal,” until Humphrey, close to tears, was forced to retreat from the stage. Wilkie filed a long story describing the incident and concluding that Humphrey was so unpopular with students that he could no longer speak on a college campus.

  There were no TV cameramen at the rally, and of the fifteen reporters who covered the speech, only one besides Wilkie filed a detailed account of the heckling. The next day, when Wilkie went into the office, the managing editor was laughing about the story. “We’ve kind of started wondering,” he teased Wilkie. “Several people have called and said that they didn’t see anything about Humphrey on Channel Six, and they seem to think you made it up. And we’re beginning to wonder ourselves, because none of the wire services mentioned it.” Wilkie began to sweat; he nearly convinced himself that he had grossly exaggerated the incident. Late that afternoon, he came across a piece by Phil Potter, a veteran reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Potter’s version of the incident agreed with Wilkie’s. With great relief, Curt clipped the article and showed it to the managing editor.

  For months afterward, Wilkie felt slightly qualmish whenever he thought about the Humphrey story. “They sort of put me on notice that somebody was carefully reading my stuff, that time,” he said after the election. “It may have inhibited me, I don’t know.” But it didn’t drive him back to the safety of the pack. He continued to trust his own judgment and write about whatever he himself thought was important. In October, when he was one of the few reporters to file a full account of an ugly Nixon rally where the President smiled at the sight of demonstrators being beaten up, the paper printed his articles without questioning them. “After a while,” he said, “the guys on my desk began to have enough faith in me that they would accept anything I gave them regardless of what their wire services were telling them. They may have wondered a couple of times, but that didn’t prevent them from running it.”

  What made this all the more remarkable was that the News-Journal was owned by the arch-conservative DuPont family,§ and had long been famous for resisting news stories that gave any comfort to liberals. Ben Bagdikian, in his book The Effete Conspiracy, had used the News-Journal as a case study in biased journalism. According to Bagdikian, one of the owners had once even “complained bitterly to the editors that the paper’s reporter had written a conventional news account of a Democratic rally when he should have turned it into a pro-Republican essay.”‖ In the late sixties, however, stronger editors had taken over, and in the fall of 1972 they decided not to endorse either Nixon or McGovern, much to the displeasure of the DuPonts. The DuPonts’ dissenting editorial, which exhorted readers to vote for every Republican on the ballot, was relegated to the letters column under the coy heading “A View from the Top.” Wilkie was assigned to write a story about the rift. Interviewing the DuPonts, he asked whether a proposed merger pending before the SEC had anything to do with their endorsement of Nixon. Only a few years before, such impertinence would have been unthinkable.a

  But one should not make too much of Curt Wilkie and the News-Journal. There were still lazy men on the bus, and men with large families to feed or powerful ambitions to nurture, who feared losing their jobs and thus played it safe by sticking with the pack. And there were still editors whose suspicions of any unusual story made pack journalism look cozy and inviting to their reporters. Campaign journalism is, by definition, pack journalism; to follow a candidate, you must join a pack of other reporters; even the most independent journalist cannot completely escape the pressures of the pack.

  Around 8:15 A.M. on June 1 the buses rolled past the stucco housefronts of lower-middle-class Los Angeles and pulled up in front of a plain brick building that looked like a school. The press trooped down a little alley and into the back of the Grand Ballroom of the Roger Young Center. The scene resembled Bingo Night in a South Dakota parish hall—hundreds of middle-aged people sitting at long rectangular tables. They were watching George McGovern, who was speaking from the stage. The press, at the back of the room, started filling up on free Danish pastry, orange juice and coffee. Automatically, they pulled out their notebooks and wrote something down, even though McGovern was saying nothing new. They leaned sloppily against the wall or slumped in folding chairs.

  McGovern ended his speech and the Secret Service men began to wedge him through the crush of ministers and old ladies who wanted to shake his hand. By the time he had made it to the little alley which was the only route of escape from the building, three cameras had set up an ambush. This was the only “photo opportunity,” as it is called, that the TV people would have all morning. Except in dire emergencies, all TV film has to be taken before noon, so that it can be processed and transmitted to New York. Consequently, the TV people are the only reporters who are not asleep on their feet in the morning. Few TV correspondents ever join the wee-hour poker games or drinking. Connie Chung, the pretty Chinese CBS correspondent, occupied the room next to mine at the Hyatt House and she was always back by midnight, reciting a final sixty-second radio spot into her Sony or absorbing one last press release before getting a good night’s sleep. So here she was this morning, bright and alert, sticking a mike into McGovern’s face and asking him something about black ministers. The print reporters stood around and watched, just in case McGovern should say something interesting. Finally McGovern excused himself and everybody ran for the bus.

  8:20–8:50 A.M. En Route/Motorcade

  8:50–9:30 A.M. Taping—“Newsmakers”

  CBS-TV 6121 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood

  9:30–9:55 A.M. En Route/Motorcade

  9:55–10:30 A.M. Taping—“News Conference”

  NBC-TV 3000 West Alameda Ave., Burbank

  10:30–10:50 A.M. Press filing

  10.50–Noon En Route/Motorcade

  Noon–1:00 P.M. Senior Citizens Lunch and Rally

  Bixby Park�
�Band Shell

  Long Beach

  1:00–1:15 P.M. Press filing

  The reporters began to wake up as they walked into the chilly Studio 22 at CBS. There was a bank of telephones, hastily hooked up on a large worktable in the middle of the studio, and six or seven reporters made credit card calls to bureau chiefs and home offices. Dick Stout of Newsweek found out he had to file a long story and couldn’t go to San Francisco later in the day. Steve Gerstel phoned in his day’s schedule to UPI. Connie Chung dictated a few salient quotes from McGovern’s breakfast speech to CBS Radio.

  A loudspeaker announced that the interview was about to begin, so the reporters sat down on the folding chairs that were clustered around a monitor. They didn’t like having to get their news secondhand from TV, but they did enjoy being able to talk back to McGovern without his hearing them. As the program started, several reporters turned on cassette recorders. A local newscaster led off by accusing McGovern of using a slick media campaign.

  “Well, I think the documentary on my life is very well done,” McGovern answered ingenuously. The press roared with laughter. Suddenly the screen of the monitor went blank—the video tape had broken. The press started to grumble.

  “Are they gonna change that first question and make it a toughie?” asked Martin Nolan, the Boston Globe’s national political reporter. “If not, I’m gonna wait on the bus.” Nolan, a witty man in his middle thirties, had the unshaven, slack-jawed, nuts-to-you-too look of a bartender in a sailors’ café. He grew up in Dorchester, a poor section of Boston, and he asked his first tough political question at the age of twelve. “Sister, how do you know Dean Acheson’s a Communist?” he had challenged a reactionary nun in his parochial school, and the reprimand he received hadn’t daunted him from asking wiseacre questions ever since.