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Political Reporting
to his regret after being caught on
video hurling the “macaca” insult.
Such moments are then shared with
others through Facebook or MySpace,
creating ever widening ripples across
the Web without passing through a
gatekeeper’s filter where they could
be tested for truth or fairness.
What seems certain about all of this
is that rumors and lies will travel farther
and penetrate further into credulous
corners of the electorate, despite the
protestations of those who champion
the self-correcting mechanisms they
say are inherent to this new model of
communicating news and information.
In 1988, I wanted to be Maureen
Dowd. That year the Republican
convention was held in New Orleans.
I was working for The Times-
Picayune, and the paper embarked
on a plan that would be unthinkable
today: It would spend gobs of money
on national campaign coverage. The
ultimate goal was to produce insightful,
hard-hitting papers during that one
week in August the national media
came to town, thus boosting the paper’s
then-middling reputation.
Along with a half-dozen other very
green Times-Picayune reporters, I decamped
to Iowa and New Hampshire.
Then we later trekked around the
country following George H.W. Bush,
Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole, Jesse
Jackson, and the rest. The paper also
hosted a giant convention-week media
party, catered by an all-star lineup of
New Orleans restaurants and featuring
the Neville Brothers. Was all this
worth the investment? Maybe. Twenty
42 Nieman Reports | Summer 2008
No doubt, too, that as people deputize
themselves as newsgatherers without
understanding—or perhaps while ignoring—the
conventions that journalists
embrace, ethical corners will be
cut. And the definition of “journalist”
might, indeed, be rewritten, at least
in the public’s mind.
But thicker skin and citizen’s code
of caveat emptor might be the price
we pay for a process that gets much
closer to being democratic than the
one that came before. Like it or not,
the era is over when influence was
reserved for the high clergy of the
old press—and when Mayhill Fowler’s
years later, journalists are still telling
me how great that party was. But
they don’t remember much about our
coverage of the Iowa caucuses.
Attitude Arrives
I emulated Dowd because she brought
attitude to the campaign, capturing its
absurdities and contradictions—something
that straight newspaper coverage
rarely did. Her success brought
something of the subversiveness of
the “Boys on the Bus,” the New Journalism,
and Hunter S. Thompson to
that blandest of mass culture organs,
the daily newspaper. It was a sensible
response to the artifice of the Reagan
years: Follow a candidate around
for long enough, and no amount
of message discipline or consultant
packaging could hide certain truths.
When I witnessed a now-famous incident—Michael
Dukakis’s helmeted
head poking out of a rolling tank at
musings wouldn’t have traveled beyond
her holiday card list.
Tom Fiedler is dean of Boston University’s
College of Communication. A former
reporter, columnist and executive
editor of The Miami Herald, he was a
Shorenstein Center Fellow at Harvard
in the fall of 2007, where he wrote a
paper about political reporting entitled,
“The Road to Wikipolitics: Life
and Death of the Modern Presidential
Primary b. 1968—d. 2008.” His coverage
of the 1988 presidential election
won him the top award from the Society
of Professional Journalists.
New Media Battles Old to Define Internet-Era
Politics
‘Because of tradition, inertia and command of the largest, most diverse
audiences, the mainstream media still drive the campaign bus with the same
old road map.’
BY JOHN MCQUAID
a factory in Michigan—my determination
to be even-handed melted away;
the only possible human reaction was
an amazed snicker.
Two decades later, though, Dowdism
has taken the media, and the campaign
culture itself, down a troubled path.
The character-based journalism she
champions has become the driving
force in campaign coverage. The media
are constantly on the lookout for
the odd moment that might capture
some revealing truth about a candidate—and,
ideally, create a feeding
frenzy that consumes the campaign.
In 2000, Al Gore’s exaggerated sighing
during a debate, his TV makeup,
and even the color of his clothing
became media obsessions. In 2004,
it was John Kerry’s supposed cultural
elitism: the windsurfing, the request
for Swiss on his Philly cheesesteak.
The problem is, such issues are almost
always essentially trivial, having little
to do with substantive issues or how