Robert Draper, in an interview with WWD, answers the Big Question most people had after reading his revealing profile of the McCain campaign in last week’s New York Times Magazine: How did he get all that access?
When I began this story in early August, the McCain campaign felt pretty sanguine about their prospects.…Though the outcome of the story is not as they would have scripted it, it’s understood by them and others that I didn’t sucker punch them. It helped that I had contacts in the McCain campaign from the previous GQ stories I had done and I had a lot of contacts in Bush world. A lot of those people had gone to work for John McCain. That led to their belief that they’d get fair-handed treatment from me. And we’re talking about The New York Times, with whom they have an adversarial relationship.…I think their calculation was, if they’re ever going to get a fair shake from The New York Times, it’s going to be with Draper.
P.S. Draper’s also blogging the last leg of the election for GQ.
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.