campaign desk

Mike Murphy’s Media Moment

Caught up in McCain’s campaign minutiae

July 9, 2008

“So Where’s Murphy?” asked New York Times columnist William Kristol on Monday, in the final forty-eight hours of speculation about whether Republican political strategist Mike Murphy would join the McCain campaign. Kristol wasn’t alone: The Times, the Washington Post,
The Atlantic, and
The New Republic have been sniffing around after Murphy since early February. In the last week, the search for Mike reached fever pitch as, day after day, the Times wondered what would become of McCain’s 2000 campaign advisor. Evidently nothing: Around 10:00 am on Tuesday, Politico reported that Murphy would not be joining the McCampaign after all. The news was prominently placed on the front page of the Times’s Web site.

The Times‘s close coverage of the “will he, won’t he” saga speaks to the toll that life on the bus may take on reporters. For reporters like Adam Nagourney, who penned most of the Times‘s stories on the topic, Murphy’s arrival—and other comings and goings on the Straight Talk Express—matters: Who’s in charge affects how journalists do their jobs, in terms of how much access they get and who they deal with on a daily basis. But it also points to how hard it is for on-the-bus reporters to make accurate judgments about the ultimate newsworthiness of insider campaign management stories.

MSNBC argues that in-depth strategy coverage is, in fact, worth voters’ attention. In an ad for “The Race to the White House,” MSNBC’s David Gregory says: “How they run their campaign tells you a lot about how they will run the country.” Well, maybe. But it also tells you a lot about the equal value that the media often assigns to its coverage of issues and of campaign strategy.

Think of America’s population as four concentric circles: The outside circle represents everyone who is eligible to vote. The smaller circle—about 60 percent in 2004—includes those who vote in presidential elections. The next ring describes people who follow the election coverage on TV and in the newspapers. And then, in the center, are the junkies who closely follow every twist and every turn. Gregory and Nagourney themselves fall into this last category, and their coverage often seems geared to those like themselves, often to the exclusion of a broader audience.

Of course, campaign strategy (and conscientious coverage of same) does matter: Very recent history shows the impact that Karl Rove had not just on the Bush campaigns, but also the subsequent Bush administrations. But the coverage about Murphy’s possible involvement focused more on sheer speculation and possible personality clashes between him and McCain staffer Steve Schmidt, instead of the actual impact Murphy would have on McCain’s campaign. Murphy’s decision to not take the job reveals the lack of substance in all that speculation.

The Murphy saga is reminiscent of a particularly juicy bit of office gossip, shared with people who, in the end, neither know nor care about the players involved. Ultimately, Murphy himself best summarized the problems inherent in the media’s giddy will-he/won’t-he guessing games: “I think this staff speculation is not helpful to the campaign. I don’t want to be controversial, and I don’t want to be distracting from the senator’s message,” Murphy told the Times. Or, for that matter, distracting reporters from covering and critiquing that message.

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Katia Bachko is on staff at The New Yorker.