Obviously, a lot changed from 1948 to 1972. Television went from an apparent fad that would never manage to truly compete with radio to a nationwide phenomenon that has not yet given up its top-dog status to the Internet as the main media outlet. The prospect of traveling the nation by train, engaging in a whistle-stop campaign seemed down provincial by 1972, thanks to aircraft.
However, what struck me about the differences between The Last Campaign, which detailed the historic battle between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey, and The Boys on the Bus, which was about JFK’s challenge of Richard Nixon for the top spot at the White House, was the role of the media, specifically, how the media came to reflect the campaign as a result of the press’s relationship with whatever candidate they happened to be covering.
While the conventional practice of having reporters solely follow one candidate through the long and arduous process of a presidential campaign obviously carries some much-needed pluses (familiarity with the candidate and his issues, a sense of perspective on the ups and downs of a campaign you’ve been with from the beginning, and a chance to establish a repore with a candidate at the very beginning, with the off chance that he could eventually become President, at which point the reporter would follow him to the White House), it appears that the passage of time did not dilute the occasional loss of perspective reporters developed after spending a substantial amount of time with a single candidate.
In The Last Campaign, Karabell paints a picture of Harry S. Truman traveling across the nation and developing a good, friendly relationship with his traveling media entourage. According to his description, the press seemed to warm to Truman over that period. On the other side of the ticket, it appeared that Dewey was not disliked by the press corps, but Karabell definitely indicated that the relationship was closer to frosty than familial. It wasn’t that Dewey did anything wrong, he just didn’t do anything particularly right to ingratiate himself to this group of people that were essential to getting his campaign message out.
Karabell certainly doesn’t suggest that the reporters following either campaign deliberately attempted to paint a more or less favorable light on their candidate, but he did say that the media’s relationship with the candidate could result in some oh-so-slight changes here and there to the reporting. An extra descriptive word here or there, done entirely subconsciously, could add up to a particular picture over the tens of thousands of words that would ultimately be written about the campaign. Truman, despite his poor relationship with the publishers up top, got the benefit in this regard, and Dewey did not. And who’s to say that in an election as close at that one, it didn’t give Truman that definitive edge over Dewey? Something to think about in this current campaign as well, as McCain’s once-heralded relationship with the media continues to rapidly erode.
Thirty years later, the media’s relationship with a particular candidate is once again on display. Crouse notes that reporters, after extended time on the campaign trail with a single candidate, become nearly useless as “big-picture” political analysts. Simply put, they get so bogged down in the details of speeches, rallies, and all the rest, they lose any sense of perspective on what the campaign appears to the outside, casual observer, who only pops his or her head into the campaign goings-on periodically, if at all. When you couple that too-close relationship with the basic pack mentality that comes when a group of journalists all end up doing the exact same thing and writing essentially identical stories, and even in 1972 and today there’s evidence that the media, for all it’s best intentions, still suffers from some of the human elements of its coverage. We haven’t invented journalist robots just yet (thank God), so, for better and for worse, there’s still people, with all those messy things people bring to the table, writing these stories.
Things may have changed substantially between 1948 and 1972, and 1972 is nearly unrecognizeable when compared to today — I have my parents’ high school yearbooks to prove it — but the human element of political journalism still exists today. In fact, I would contend that with the emergence of the blogosphere and citizen journalism, the human element is more pervasive today than it was back then, as anyone with a computer and a desire to be heard can now effectively cover a campaign. As it was in 1948, and as it remained in 1972, the human aspect remains a significant, if under-the-radar force in political campaigns, and while it can never be eliminated, it’s certainly worth recognizing and accounting for.
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