Riding on the bubble*. Yesterday's post had me rummaging through the Times' New Hampshire coverage over the last few days, and an unedifying job of work it was. One impression dominates: the Times crew have virtually no interest in what any of us naive laymen would call reporting. (My idea of reporting is the sort of thing Josh Marshall is doing in New Hampshire, or the dispatches Tom Schaller's been filing, first from Iowa now NH, for Daily Kos—just to take a couple of near-at-hand examples from the blog space.) It's that thing were journalists put their eyes and ears where you can't, and offer you the benefit of their experience and judgement in deciding what to look at and listen to, and in determining what questions the things they see and hear can provide answers for. That thing, in other words, where journalists serve their readers by acting as the representatives of an engaged citizenry.

Try to derive a sense of place from the Times' primary reporting: with one or two mostly half-hearted exceptions, you can't. (And no, Adam Nagourney's sorry "a bus rolling through the snow-covered hills" yesterday doesn't even qualify as half-hearted.) Where are the candidates appearing? What are they saying, how are they being received, and by what audiences? What's the feeling like in the rooms? How are the local campaign organizations staffed, what are their strengths and weaknesses? What stories are developing on the ground that might give me insight into how the election is going to be decided? The Times in its wisdom doesn't appear to think those questions are worth answering.

I emphasize place because, trite as the notion of "retail politics" is, the primaries are the last moment in which the struggle for the Presidency gets fought out in local venues, in front of real audiences whose concerns the candidates have to address. It's the last moment before the election vanishes into the media ether, and there's a lot to be learned from it. But the Times staff—with their insider rolodexes, their news feeds, their antennae tuned to the CW, the self-reinforcing chatter of the campaign flacks and the press gaggle—either don't want or don't know how to bother.

In fact, that is the sense of place available from the Times reporting: read it and you're there in the press bubble, a place that's everywhere and nowhere at once. You get the feeling that that's where our correspondents feel at home, and that they're all pushing to get past the primary muck and into the clear, free space of the all-media, all-the-time campaigns, where there's no one's interest they have to represent except their own. Pity that actual politicking seems so beside the point to them.

*A somewhat random reference to a favorite Robert Lowell poem, "For the Union Dead." "Colonel Shaw/is riding on his bubble,/he waits/for the blessèd break." In case you're wondering.

posted by michael  10:10:39 AM  
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