PressThink: Philip Gourevitch On Campaign Reporting as a Foreign Beat
OK, so I was a big fan of Joan Didion's "Insider Baseball" back when it first came out, and taught it in my classes when it was in "Best Essays," what, 1989 I think?
I still think it is Didion's best writing, but then I have a hard time getting into her stuff about California.
So Rosen has another guy taking Didion's beat on the press bus, and he's got some neat observations. And I love the two anecdotes Rosen uses to close out his post, so I have to share or call attention to them.
Here goes:
Gourevitch, covering the presidential campaign for the New Yorker, came to NYU last week and shared his impressions. He's known for reporting on the aftermath of genocide. Now he's on the campaign trail with Kerry, Bush and a captive press. "There's a lot of fear in the press," he said to us. Philip Gourevitch is best known for his 1998 book on the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, a work of political reportage but a very different kind than he's doing now. In 2001 he published A Cold Case about an unsolved murder in New York.Gourevitch said his normal method as a nonfiction writer was to look for stories that weren't being covered-- that had fallen off the map. One example is his interest in the Vietnamese boat people long after the fall of Saigon. In the case of Rwanda, he said, "news coverage had just disappeared" after the reports of horrific killing there. Nobody had really explained those reports, and the violence didn't make sense to him. He went to Rwanda in 1995 because the news media had abandoned the place, where the year before some 800,000 people were slaughtered.
Bosnia during the 1990s was horrific, and newsworthy, but there were always correspondents there. Gourevitch said he had no interest in going to Bosnia. "I like it when when it's you and the thing, rather than you, the press and the thing," he said.
This made Philip Gourevitch a poor candidate to cover a presidential campaign. Hanging out with a pack of reporters, where everyone is chasing the same story (but there really is no story)-- that's alien to his experience, not the sort of thing he does at all. On the campaign trail it's always you, the press and the thing: nonstop. And your arrival is always anticipated. You are never coming into a situation as first witness for the public, which had been a Gourevitch method.
On contract at the New Yorker, he needed a new assignment, something fresh to do. Maybe another foreign beat? he thought. Bingo. Approached that way, politics had possibilities. The presidential campaign as a foreign country visited by one of its own citizens.
The idea began to grow on him. It picked up a theme the writer Joan Didion developed when she took the same assignment Gourevitch did, hers for the New York Review of Books. Meeting up with the campaign, Didion was struck by its "remoteness from the actual life of the country," which she found true of the press, as well-- and of the language they talk inside the game.
Gourevitch described this remoteness--and the isolation of the campaign press in 2004-- precisely and vividly during his talk with us. I believe that was the thing he found most alive: a remoteness that was in motion. He described a campaign "machine," something you get caught up in. But also: you sign up for it. No one can say you are forced to come along. The bubble is contractual.
"A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show," he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event.
I love the stuff (it goes on) about the hermetically sealed press bubble. This next bit didn't surprise me, however.
"There's a lot of fear in the press," he said. Fear of editors, of audiences, of losing access, feeling isolated, being out of step. "Part of the problem for the campaign press is, this is your social world"-- which is a different kind of bubble. Journalists hang out with journalists and politicos. They marry each other, and many are also wedded to the game, to politics. These are just factors, he said. Atmospherics that favor outcomes but cause nothing to happen.
The bit below, these assumptions made by the media and not necessarily supported by practice or research, I see that a lot where I am as well.
Political reporters become expert in the management of the campaign, the horse race ("which is interesting," he said) because the big issues today are "genuinely confusing." They feel the answers to most policy questions require a language and knowledge base "that are essentially the property of elites."
The vileness of these assumptions (I used to work hard with my college freshmen to make them more aware media users, and I know the assumptions are wrong) is why I am so drawn to radical democratization of the media.
The paragraph below is Rosen's common hobby horse, and one where I agree with him wholeheartedly. And I love the two very telling anecdotes below that.
Gourevitch noted that Americans have not always had or desired a "neutral omniscent press that takes no stance and has no partisanship." But one of the consequences of that kind of journalism "is to support the notion that the truth is just a matter of opinion."I will leave you with two stories he told us.
Gourevitch joins the bus, and trudges through the morning's events. Nothing but photo ops and words heard a hundred times that week. There's a break and he pulls out his notebook. Then he realizes not a single thing happened that is worth writing down. But the other reporters have opened their laptops and they are springing into action. They found nothing to write down either. They're checking emails, pagers, and the Net because they "receive" the campaign that way. The bubble is made of data too.
The minders are hitting them with messages all the time. The spin from the campaigns not only never stops, it never stops looking for more crevices through which it can fit.
Second story. I didn't catch all the details but the gist is in the title: the Last Man in Vietnam. This was the reporter who decided to stay after all the correspondents in Saigon were pulling out because the Americans had pulled out and the Communists were going to win. His notion was to wait out the revolution--he was tough and knew the city, knew his odds--and when the smoke cleared he would be the only Western correspondent in a position to tell the story of the new Vietnam. A monopoly provider! He knew the market and would get to name his price.
Everything happened according to plan. The Western reporters left. The Communists came. The new era of Vietnam began. The Last Man made some calls offering his services. But no one would employ him. He hadn't guessed it: there was no story in Vietnam because the press had left.
Recent Comments