Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat

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, and 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 in 1988. Meeting up with the campaign, Didion was struck most 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 machinery you get caught up in. But also: you sign up for it. No one can say you are forced to come along.

"A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show," he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event.

The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. The bubble is a physical thing: a threshold your body crosses. If you are part of the traveling press corps, sticking with the candidate through the swing states, then you have to be swept--screened for weapons and explosives--or you cannot be on the bus. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand.

But just as real, and interacting with the security bubble, is another kind, more akin to a thought bubble above a cartoon character's head.

"The press moving as a pack confirms its own take on things," Gourevitch said. (That's as well as I have heard anyone put it.) There are many names for this take. It's called pack journalism. Conventional wisdom. The herd mentality. The script. The frame. Master narrative. It's the story you agree to accept because it tells you and everybody else what you (and everybody else) are doing on the bus.

Cheesy package tour. That was Gourevitch's first impression about traveling with the campaigns. You sign up. You get on the bus. It hits all the major sights. Crowds of people get off at each one. Then they get back on. The campaigns tell you what the schedule is. The campaigns tell you where the pick up will be. The campaigns feed you, get you to the airport, take you from the airport.

"Right there they have you," Gourevitch told our crowd of about 50 journalism students and faculty. "Outside the bubble you cannot go because then you're dirty again and have to be checked by the Secret Service." Under these conditions, he said, "no spontaneous reporting is possible."

You cannot jump into the crowd with an audio recorder and find out why those people were chanting what they were chanting before they were shown away by security guards. Accepting this limitation--a big one--becomes part of the bubble.

It must have struck Gourevitch at a certain point that he had seen these conditions before: in the captive press of other countries he had reported from. For if the people on it do not have freedom of movement, in what sense is the campaign bus the carrier of a free press? The reporters who travel with the candidates come close to being captives in a "campaign machine," as Gourevitch several times called it.

"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 Note calls them the Gang of 500. I say tribe. Gourevitch tended to say pack. The pack way is not a form of journalism, really. It's a state of mind that competes with journalism. Sometimes what people in their occupation most want is not to look like a jerk in front of peers. Not to be the one who gets caught out. Bigger factor than you think, he said. Especially around George W. Bush, but not only then.

Gourevitch said the President was a master of school yard bullying disguised as amusing banter (to which no one can object without sounding like a prig.) "Which means we laugh at his cruelty," he said. A lot of reporters, including many liberal journalists, "have a weird fatalism about the election-- that Bush and the Republicans just know how to do all this."

Here's Gourevitch in the New Yorker Sep. 6:

Bush campaigns with the eager self-delight of a natural ham. There’s an appealing physicality about him. When he says he wants your vote, he does not just mouth the words but follows them through with his entire body, rising to his toes, tilting toward you yearningly. When he works his way along the edge of the stage, waving, shaking hands, he has the concentration of an athlete in the thrall of his game. He seems to hold nothing back. He reaches for the hands around him, tipping so far forward that it appears, in the frozen fraction of a second captured in photographs, that he has lost his balance.

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." That is why there is limited interest in issues that connect to our troubles.

Gourevitch believes that nobody involved in the system wants included in presidential campaigning--at this stage--the kind of engaged and informed debate that would tax the viewer, cause the readers eyes to glaze over, repel the listener, push buttons in the wrong voters, screw up the schedule. The candidates, the staffs, and the press all have their reasons--stated and never stated--for maintaining a "pretend" discussion.

"It's not a conspiracy but there is complicity in saying: this is really too complicated," meaning: too much for a public paying fickle attention to politics. Spin absorbs what the audience's circuits allegedly cannot. And while spontaneous reporting cannot thrive inside the bubble, spin can. It is portable, light weight, adaptable, ready in an instant.

The way John Kerry became the Democatic Party's nominee, according to Gourevitch, is by suddenly distinguishing himself as "electable," which is a kind of conventional wisdom. People start to say it: Kerry seems electable. Then the polls ask about it. Reporters repeat the poll results. Pundits repeat the reporters. Electability, a strangely circular category, became the argument for Kerry because in comparison to the rest of a weak field he was more electable. But that is no argument for his election.

Gourevitch took on the voice of a New York deli clerk dispensing advice over the slicer when he was asked what the GOP operatives thought of facing Kerry when they didn't get Howard Dean, their first choice. "Kerry? Who is Kerry? Cloud of smoke. Does anyone know who he is? Do you know? Oh, you don't? Well, there you go. That's Kerry." Next!

His advice to the press: People on the bus are afraid of lost access but access isn't worth anything when candidates won't answer questions. Freedom doesn't lie in access. It means having an adversarial press, an independent press, a political press that can challenge power. "These guys want to control the story, we should contest that."

Contest it? There is certainly opportunity for that. Right now, the campaign press is still putting up with No Access to Candidates and No Questions Allowed. (See this.) Right now, it is continuing to move with the campaigns, which means inside the bubble. Gourevitch was effective in reminding us that it was always possible to break away. The bubble is contractual.

During NPR's On the Media this week, correspondent Paul Farhi of the Washington Post was interviewed on seething frustrations in the press over limited access. Which really means over the contract they signed. (See also his earlier report on it in the Post.)

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's often been noted that Al Gore actually alienated his press corps, and suffered thereby. Is the lack of accessibility in the Kerry campaign breeding resentment?

PAUL FARHI: Yes, I was in Cincinnati with him last week, and we were all fired up, because they passed the word that he was going to come out and make a statement, which suggested to us that he was also going to take questions. We were all arranged on the tarmac at the airport. He read a statement for about 26 seconds or so, and he turned his back and walked away, and-- it's moments like that that make you feel like a campaign stenographer rather than a campaign reporter -- we are being fed what the campaign wants us to have and not, obviously, what we'd like to know about. And-- you could hear, literally, people fuming about - and [LAUGHTER] see people fuming about the way we were treated at that moment.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think this media strategy is working or working against him?

PAUL FARHI: In their own narrow way, it is working. (Hat tip Romenesko.)

And you have to wonder: can a candidate lose his traveling press corps by stiffing them too often, too well, too openly? Or will any degree of stiffing remain possible within the bubble as it floats around?

Last week, Gourevitch's questions were these. Why not set more of the agenda? Why not say, "Sir, you haven't answered the question?" Why don't they gang up? Stick with one question until they get a reply. Rebel against the bubble's rules. This was something about the natives Gourevitch hadn't fully figured out. The best answer he had was a "kind of overload."

Too many issues to raise, too many scandalous facts to present, too much history to absorb and ask about, too many questions that really do need to be faced, and aren't going to be faced. The press is overwhelmed every minute of its day. But how can it say 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.

A trail of meaninglessly scripted events is taken for granted, the emptiness at each stop is tolerated, in part because things crackle and hop so much in the information sphere. And with today's gear you are always reachable by information.

The minders are hitting them with messages round the clock. 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 would get to name his price.

Everything happened according to plan. The Western reporters left. The Communists came. The new era of a unified Vietnam began. The Last Man made some calls offering his services. But no one would employ him. There couldn't be a story anymore in Vietnam because the press had left.

Philip Gourevitch, Bushspeak: The President’s vernacular style. The New Yorker (Posted Sep. 6, 2004)

Philip Gourevitch, Damage Control: Voters need to believe that John Kerry can put the country back on track. The New Yorker (Posted July 19, 2004)

"Reporting the Story of a Genocide." Interview with Philip Gourevitch, 2000, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley.

Brian Montopoli, A Day in The Bubble, Campaign Desk (Sep. 21): Montopoli says he

asked the Los Angeles Times' Matea Gold if she worries that all the chatter among political reporters thrown together in small spaces all day long ultimately impacts their coverage.

"I personally try to limit my discussion with other reporters just for that reason," she said. "I can't say it shapes reporters' thinking, but it's definitely a risk. We're held captive in this little bubble for so long. We so rarely have time to go into a crowd and actually talk to people."

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:55 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack (3) | Link 

Did the President of CBS News Have Anyone in Charge of Reading the Internet and Sending Alerts?

"Today's announcement is just one part of a massive institutional failure at CBS, much of it still to be uncovered...."

One person close to the situation said the critical question would be, "Where was everybody's judgment on that last day?'' -- New York Times account, Sep. 20.

CBS News, having now admitted that documents it relied on were inauthentic, will have troubles graver than a retraction of Dan Rather's account and an official apology to President Bush, to CBS viewers and to the American public. For starters:

• Restive affiliates, and political pressure on those affiliates to be restive. The significance of this lies in the possibility of two fronts in a war to de-legitimate CBS News, which is quite likely to happen now, I regret to say. Like in a political campaign, you will have local chapters in a national effort. Direct pressure on the network in New York, pressure on the affiliates, which may be felt in New York.
• Beyond that, we will see other Internet campaigns to more or less officially discredit CBS, taking unknown course because we are in unknown territory. First target: getting Bob Schieffer kicked out of the presidential debates. (See this too, and see BoycottCBS.com.)

Posted by Jay Rosen at 02:39 PM | Comments (57) | TrackBack (6) | Link 

Rather's Satisfaction: Mystifying Troubles at CBS

After Mr. Rather posed a question to Nixon at a National Association of Broadcasters convention in 1974, Nixon asked pointedly, "Are you running for something?" Mr. Rather shot back, "No, Mr. President, are you?" Link.

Here I take a crack at explaining why Dan Rather and CBS News have disappointed their colleagues, enraged their critics, compounded their losses, endangered the CBS brand and mystified so many observers in the days since their troubles began, which was really only hours after 60 Minutes carried a report on President Bush's record with the Texas Air National Guard.

That report, which Rather hosted, announced to the nation the sensational existence of documents CBS had failed to authenticate.

This is the crime of which the network stands accused in the theater of election year politics, and in a longer history of resentment that some see as coming to a fiery end in Rather's acts of self-destruction. Whether that's true or not, CBS has to understand that its news division has become protagonist (or villain) in a 60 Minutes-style scandal story, an investigative drama, not just an investigation.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 02:42 AM | Comments (37) | TrackBack (4) | Link 

Campaign Puzzler: How the Press Comes Out with a Win

This developed as the conclusion, or part two of yesterday's post, Stark Message for the Legacy Media.

... For around the table, the traditional assumption would have held: it's the candidates, the parties, the players who are trying to prevail and beat the other guy. We're the press, we cover the campaign. It's not our role to affect the outcome. We're there to tell people what happens, and ask questions. We're there to dig and get answers. We're not running for anything. We're a kind of umpire, at best. So what do you mean by win, boss person?

Well, the press doesn't and shouldn't try to win the election for a candidate or a cause. But they had all been in situations when they suddenly felt sick with disappointment at how effectively they had been sidelined by a certain tactic, how thoroughly they had been manipulated by certain actors, how far from the real issues and problems they had once again strayed, how little, in fact, they were serving voters by covering what they were covering, even though they were just covering what every other political journalist thought worth covering, even though they were completing the exhausting ritual--campaign coverage--as it then stood.

How many of you, the boss might have asked, ever felt professionally defeated in that way? All hands would shoot up. There is a lot about campaign journalism that smart journalists are sick of. And this is the moment a wise boss would have waited for.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 11:43 AM | Comments (89) | TrackBack (2) | Link 

Stark Message for the Legacy Media

ABC's The Note, which I find essential these days, has its own term for them: the Gang of 500. That would be the 500 people whose decisions matter to the political news and campaign narrative we get from the major media. The Note writes a lot about this group, of which it is a self-conscious part.

At this precise time every four years, the most media-savvy members of the Gang of 500 begin to think about their roles in the premiere post-election forum that revisits the actions and players of the presidential race.

This turns out to be an event--or "quadrennial gabfest"--at Harvard's Institute of Politics, held in the winter, after the campaign has ended but while memories are fresh, where the task is to write the second draft of history for campaign 2004, and to figure out what actually happened. Check out the guest list:

a group of journalists who covered the campaign leading top political players from all camps through a chronological discussion of who-did-what-when-and-why behind the scenes during the course of the nomination and general election periods.

The Note on September 10th told us that journalists are now starting to project to what they will be saying in recap then. They are bouncing forward to the post-mortem, planting imaginary feet, and looking back at what happened in the 2004 election cycle.

For the Democrats in Cambridge (under a Kerry loss scenario), the talk will be about August, reliving the Dukakis nightmare, and the press's inability to live up to the shared claim about the historic "importance" of the election.

According to The Note, the issues on the table for the press will be "the ease with which the establishment media was led around by the nose by the Internet, cable, and paid media that was just above the video-press-release level." Led around by the nose-- and by inferior material!

Nothing new in that, but I found this prediction revealing: "... even if Kerry wins, there will be much talk about the discipline, focus, success, and, yes, shamelessness of the [Bush Cheney] team." What that team will be said to have accomplished:

Posted by Jay Rosen at 11:09 PM | Comments (28) | TrackBack (7) | Link 

Weekend Notes With "Forgery" Swirling in the Air

Four things to stick in the front of your mind:

• It completely elevates the episode and charges it with political and cultural tension that the anchorman, Dan Rather, presented the CBS report Wednesday Night accusing Bush of disappearing from Guard duty. If Sixty Minutes had presented a damaging story of that kind at the height of an election campaign and it turned out to be based on forged documents, that would itself be a crisis. But it was Dan Rather on Sixty Minutes, and it is now Rather on the hook if the documents are fake. (Indeed, Rather told the Los Angeles Times, "I'm of the school, my name is on it, I'm responsible.") That brings in Rather's celebrity, the corporate iconography in which an anchorman is always involved, the succession drama at CBS News now that Rather is 72 years old, and the enormous venom out there for Rather, who is seen on the Right as a man of many political sins. Thus, PowerLine wrote: "This would appear to signal the end of Rather's career. If the documents are ultimately accepted as forgeries, which seems inevitable to us, he can't survive." All of which means this is not just a scandal, but a cultural theatre for it, and that's different.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 02:17 AM | Comments (205) | TrackBack (8) | Link 

Tom Fiedler's Rock Concert Credibility Blues

On Aug. 23, Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, warned his staff against a temptation they will face during the political season. "Don't succumb," he urged, except it sounded more like an order than an urging, since he is the boss, after all, and also since the behavior in question was, he said, prohibited by the Herald's Guidelines on Ethics.

According to Fiedler, the ethically alert journalist, realizing that Bruce Springsteen, REM, Bonnie Raitt, John Mellencamp and others want to support John Kerry in a special concert tour of key states, will resist the temptation to snag two tickets and enjoy the music when the show comes to Miami, Orlando, or Clearwater, Florida. "My advice," Fiedler wrote: "Unless you are covering one of these partisan events as a working journalist, stay away."

Stay away from the concerts, the boss advised, because "avoiding conflicts of interest, real and perceived" is among "the compromises that we accept" as journalists at the Herald. Actually, he didn't mean that. He meant "among the sacrifices we accept to avoid being compromised," but the memo was probably written in haste. It later showed up at Romenesko, as memos sometimes do, and from there Fiedler's Rules became an item of debate.

When you think about it, it's an extraordinary little claim: that attending a rock concert like a normal person can somehow threaten the credibility of the Miami Herald. How is such a verdict reached?

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:46 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0) | Link 

"Turn to Fox News for Exclusive Coverage of the Republican National Convention."

Madison Square Garden, Sep. 2. First, there's the news that Fox beat all networks--not just its cable competitors--in the ratings race at the Republican convention.

Then there's this story, from the newspaper The Hill:

The love-in between Republican delegates and Fox News Channel continued on Tuesday night, as a group of delegates seated directly facing CNN’s broadcast booth began taunting the CNN cast and crew.

“Watch Fox News” chanted the delegates and other convention-goers in Section 223, likely broadcasting the message to millions of homes tuned in to CNN

Then there's the item I reported earlier this week: the deal CNN negotiated with the Democratic Party for a special broadcast platform on the arena floor. No other network had it.

Then there's the decision by the major broadcast networks to devote only three hours over four nights to both conventions, due to declining news value and flagging interest. David Westin, president of ABC News, wrote about it:

Posted by Jay Rosen at 09:52 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (4) | Link 

Independence From the Press Rocks the Gatekeeper's World

Madison Square Garden, Sep 1. It's more of an impression gathered, not something easily witnessed in the behavior of reporters and editors here at the Republican convention; but I think the political press has been stunned by the attack on John Kerry's military record, and by the events since August 5, when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began running their ads.

That is the word I would use: stunned.

Here and there it is spoken of outright: "I spotted the headline in the Sunday Tribune's first edition early Saturday afternoon," wrote Michael Miner in the Chicago Reader. He is referring to William Rood's first person account of Kerry's courageous actions as a Swift Boat commander, published Aug. 22. Rood, a Chicago Tribune editor, was a Swift Boat skipper himself. Miner, a journalist, recalls his reaction:

"That's it," I thought, naively, after reading the first few paragraphs. "The issue's off the table."

And he was stunned to discover it wasn't. The same feeling was there when Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe, appearing Aug. 19 on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, told John O'Neill, author of Unfit for Command and one of the veterans making the charges, "You haven't come within a country mile of meeting first-grade journalistic standards for accuracy." That's what "keeps this story in the tabloids," said Oliphant, but of course he was saying this not in the tabloids, but on the very respectable Newshour .

Posted by Jay Rosen at 10:45 PM | Comments (183) | TrackBack (3) | Link 

Down at the Tick Tock Diner, I Caught Up With CNN

Madison Square Garden, Aug. 30: Today I dropped by CNN's Tick Tock Diner, which sits on Eighth Avenue and 34 Street, catty corner from the arena and well inside the security perimeter. It's hard to say exactly what the Diner is during its temporary lease to CNN.

"It has all the trappings of a diner," wrote Dante Chinni in the Christian Science Monitor. "There are chrome stools and booths, and waiters dressed in CNN aprons and shirts. But there's no real diner-- it's more of a VIP/media lounge cum TV-show set."

Now according to Sam Feist, senior executive producer for political programming, the idea was to grab a location "that screamed New York." And said politics. This is it, he said, gesturing around-- a true New York Diner.

"Did you have breakfast?" Sam said. I told him I was working. Eason Jordan, executive vice president and chief news executive of CNN, asked me the same thing. Did you have breakfast?

Posted by Jay Rosen at 02:15 AM | Comments (27) | TrackBack (1) | Link 

RNC Drops the Battleship-Style Stage; Goes Lighter, More Flexible

Madison Square Garden, Aug. 29: Credentials and work space had to be secured, so I missed most of the march. But I did see something that instantly moved me as it passed by on Seventh Avenue: four or five people balancing a big globe, with the continents and oceans of the earth painted on. There was imagination in that. It was a sign without specific message. There's the globe, it said. And we all live on it!

Sometimes politics is about getting your people to turn out. You simply parade as many as you can, speaking freely and against Bush, past a hypothetical midpoint on 7th Avenue, which is Madison Square Garden's front door-- and the Republican Party's home for the week.

After the march, I went to look at what the Republicans had done with the Garden. How the planners handled the space might, I thought, contain signals about the Party and even W., as the President is playfully called on some of the message boards in the arena.

My last post was about the decision to create a separate stage for Bush--a theatre in the round--on the convention's final night, and what that particular move "said" politically.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 01:54 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (1) | Link 

From a Small Circular Stage in a Sea of Thousands

The art and design of political conventions are advancing before our eyes. The old forms are breaking up. The stage is literally coming apart. New ideas are emerging in how to "carry" the convention to the rest of the nation-- and how to get people to watch.

The latest news confirms it. Once they built a stage for the convention. And on that stage a raised platform, a dias, with a microphone. This was an idea about authority, and clear sight lines. But some ideas are changing.

"President Bush will give his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention next week from a small circular stage in a sea of thousands of delegates and other guests," wrote Michael Slackman in the New York Times today. (Aug. 27)

In a sea of thousands is a leader who can step up just a little and yet be heard.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 08:14 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (2) | Link 

"None of us knows what this is going to turn into. By everyone’s hope, it won’t be Chicago 1968."

A general sense of foreboding has emerged among prominent political TV reporters who are bracing for the hottest political convention since 1968. --Newsday report, Aug. 26.

A couple of reminders this week of just how politicized the territory has become around the major media. There's a rise in tensions as we get closer to the convention countdown in New York.

On Tuesday (Aug. 24) TV Newser reported that the area around Fox News Headquarters in New York City had received concrete fortifications.

Security concerns have led Rockefeller Center to position fixtures outside Fox News headquarters ahead of the GOP convention. "About 12 large round concrete fixtures doubling as oversized flower pots were positioned in front of the Fox News studios on 6th Avenue" recently, an e-mailer says. "These are obviously positioned to prevent any vehicles from the street to jump the sidewalk and get close to the building."

Fox News is one of the sites around New York City where a prudent police force might expect trouble-- because of what it stands for, and in alignment with. Media sites are political sites, especially in Fox's case, which means there's a potential for violence but also for political expression.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:59 AM | Comments (27) | TrackBack (2) | Link 

The Convention in Section View

Cross posted to Sky Box, my convention weblog as a contributing writer for Knight-Ridder. See the welcome post here.

When I was in Boston, at the Fleet Center, covering the last convention, I spent time in the mornings walking around the arena, before it filled with conventioneers. Looking at the space when it was empty made it easier to see how it worked when the red light was on. The more I studied the set-up --what they built at the Fleet Center to "hold" the convention--the clearer it got.

Imagine taking a big knife and slicing the Fleet Center in two from the top. The building is now in cross section and it's shown there are levels to the convention, a vertical order.

Level One, at the bottom, is the convention floor, assigned to the delegates, who are seated by states. (It crawls with journalists too, and those who have passes.)

Level Two is the podium, set on an enormous and expensive stage, and... directly across the way, on the arena's opposte side, the big bank of television cameras, clustered for the head-on shot, and centered at mid-court.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:06 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0) | Link 

Late For the Sky: My New Convention Blog

Sky Box will be my temporary forum, but I will cross post most stuff to PressThink and may do posts for PressThink that aren't for Sky Box. There's a team of Knight-Ridder journalists who are continuing a weblog experiment they began last month in Boston. I'm joining them. Soon we'll have a special page where you can find all the K-R people who are blogging the RNC, and I will link to it.

I decided to call the blog Sky Box because I see the network sky boxes with their blazing logos--NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, PBS--as part of the iconography of a political convention. A key part.

But "reading" what this image says has gotten harder and harder, as the big broadcast networks have shrunk their coverage to three hours, while the cable channels go end-to-end, and yet talk over the event for most of their time on air. What happens inside the sky boxes, where producers make TV of the convention, is still important. And for Americans who are viewers of political television, the vantage point of the sky box is totally familiar.

Yet we might never think about it as a "position" of its own.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 04:53 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0) | Link