By Brian Montopoli
Editor’s note: Campaign Desk’s Brian Montopoli joined the reporters accompanying Senator John Kerry as they passed through New York City on Monday. Here is his report.
At 8:15 yesterday morning, a group of groggy, coffee-swilling reporters and cameramen emerged from a Sheraton in midtown Manhattan and climbed into one of three small, white buses. As the bus rolled down Seventh Avenue towards New York University, the morning haze lifted, the Blackberries came out, and the chatter began.
“Did they say we’re going to Third and LaGuardia?” someone wondered, confusing the airport with a small street in Greenwich Village. “We’re not going to LaGuardia.” Asked another: “Is there going to be an announcement today about the debates?” Two reporters in the back of the bus groused about Kerry’s unavailability. “He made a lot of noise about how he’s going to have all these press conferences, but there’s such a lack of access to the man himself,” one said. “It pisses me off.”
As the bus pulled up to NYU, the reporters looked out at the line of students waiting to get into the speech. “You’ll be disappointed,” the reporter who had been complaining about access said, in a singsong voice, to no one in particular. The traveling press piled off the bus and headed towards the entrance to the building, where CNN’s Bob Franken was waiting to do a report. While waiting in line to enter, other CNN staffers heckled Franken, asking if he was local press — apparently, quite a putdown. Candy Crowley walked up behind Franken and put bunny ears up behind his head. Word spread that another bus, carrying the TV pool, had gone off course, and it turned out to be true: the Kerry motorcade had been passed on its way to NYU by the Japanese prime minister’s smaller convoy, and the confused TV pool’s bus driver had accidentally followed the prime minister towards the United Nations. After someone realized the mistake, the bus abandoned the PM and sped downtown.
Once we got through security, the media folks waited to have their gear inspected. Thanks to a logistical snafu, there had been no credentials made for new members of the traveling press corps, so many reporters were wearing “New York University Guest” stickers with the word “Guest” crossed out and the word “Press” scrawled above it. (These would later be replaced by red ribbons, and, after that, by “I (heart) NY” buttons.) One reporter, who had been with Kerry for months, ran into a colleague who had just come back out onto the trail. “What have you been doing?” she asked, before adding, sarcastically, “Real, actual stories where things happen?”
The press filing area for Kerry’s NYU speech — a foreign policy address that had been billed as significant — was the band rehearsal room in the building’s basement. There was a continental breakfast laid out, decent Internet access, and a TV on which reporters could watch the speech — but no cell phone service, bad news for wire reporters who often do their reporting from these filing areas. (Since they need to send their stories so quickly, wire reporters write much of their story from the filing area before a speech is even finished.) Most reporters who travel with a candidate are either single or childless, but since this was such an important speech, a few so-called Big Dogs had entered the bubble.
Upstairs, in the hall where Kerry would be speaking, the press seats, in the back of the room, were starting to fill up. Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin asked a reporter what paper she had just put down, and, after telling him it was the New York Times, she offered it to him. “No, I don’t want that,” he said. I asked him what he thought was the biggest problem with the press corps today.
“Fifty-seven word ledes,” said Breslin, the master of the five-word lede, in a raspy voice. “That’s all that matters. I’m supposed to read that in the morning? They hit a comma and it’s like the start of the sentence. They all went to colleges and they want to show how smart they are, so they put four commas in the lede. It’s the worst. They ought to kill themselves.”
Shanan Guinn, from Kerry’s traveling press staff, came around with copies of the candidate’s remarks, as prepared for delivery; one reporter informed a colleague, “[Kerry] can’t stick to the script, so you have to read along and correct it.” When the candidate came onto the stage, which was decorated with American flags and banners reading “Stronger at Home, Respected in the World,” the cameramen in the front row stood up for a better shot, infuriating colleagues behind them, who yelled for them to sit down. After the speech, which largely lived up to its billing, reporters rushed down to the filing room to work on their stories; since Kerry was running late, however, Guinn announced that the motorcade was leaving very soon. Anyone who wanted to head over to Kerry’s next event, the Mothers & Shakers Awards at Lincoln Center, had to go upstairs immediately. Flustered reporters gathered up their gear and headed for the buses.
On the bus, Blackberries popped out like spring flowers; Crowley and her colleagues from CNN began reading battleground state polls aloud. The heavy traffic on the West Side Highway slowed the procession to a crawl. As we passed the U.S.S. Intrepid, former ABC News correspondent and talk show host Greg Dobbs, who now works for HD Net, reflected on covering the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern. “For three or four months, all he saw were people cheering for him. We never stopped at a red light. He never saw any opposition. McGovern got to the point where he just didn’t believe the polls, which said he was going to get slaughtered. I think it genuinely came as a surprise to him.” He suggested Kerry might have a similar affliction.
At Lincoln Center, most of the traveling press gobbled a lunch of salmon, pasta, and salad over their laptops. The Kerry team provided reporters with citations for their stories about the NYU speech, including a list of exactly what Kerry was referring to when he invoked President Bush’s “23 different rationales for the war.” One reporter announced to the rest that “‘60 Minutes’ just fell on the story” — a reference to CBS’s admission that it could no longer vouch for the documents featured in a recent report about President Bush’s National Guard service. As we waited for the event to start, I asked the Washington Post’s Dan Balz how traveling with the candidate affects his coverage. “The problem with being in the bubble is that you get so backed into one reality,” he said. “The advantage is that you get an insight into how the campaign is run. But you can lose perspective on the overall state of the race.”
On my way upstairs to the event, I headed through my second metal detector of the day. As I passed through, a representative from Redbook magazine, which was hosting the luncheon, told security officers no one else should be let upstairs. I went up anyway, and she gave me an icy stare as I ascended the escalator. At the top, I was told to stand in one area, off to the side, to watch the festivities; I stayed there for ten seconds, until a Kerry rep told me to stand against the back wall. After another 30 seconds, a security official told me I couldn’t be there, either, and a debate ensued among Secret Service men, Redbook flacks and Kerry staff as to where, exactly, I should be put. They decided to allow me onto an overhang above the luncheon, but I was told to stand because all the seats are taken. When I was finally allowed up, I found 20 or so reporters lounging in a space big enough for 75, and a bunch of open chairs. I paused to look over the railing at the women and men enjoying the tiramisu placed on their pastel-colored tablecloths, and then 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.”
Gold paused to take a phone call; it was Bush/Cheney campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt, who called, unbidden, to respond to Kerry’s speech that morning. “Their war room is amazing,” said Gold, after hanging up. “They never let an opportunity go by to push back on a story.”
After the luncheon — which featured Uma Thurman, Dylan Mcdermott, Daisy Fuentes, and John and Theresa Heinz Kerry, among others — Kerry headed back to the Sheraton for a meeting with business leaders. The traveling press dispersed, since the next major event, Kerry taping an appearance Late Night with David Letterman, had been deemed “closed press.”
Everyone reconvened at the Sheraton at 5:45, piling onto buses headed for the Hilton, where Kerry was holding a fundraiser. The Hilton is a ten-minute walk from the Sheraton, but traffic was terrible, and the trip took 45 minutes; one journalist took out a photo album and showed off pictures of a doll named Gandhi he has carried with him and photographed at campaign events around the country.
After finally arriving at the Hilton, the press corps was shepherded onto a large freight elevator. When I told Doug Davis, a documentarian working on a film called “Inside the Bubble,” that I felt like cargo, he smiled and said, “You are.” Upstairs, we were told to put our gear on the floor, and the Secret Service and their bomb-sniffing dog examined it while we lined up to be inspected with a handheld metal detector. I fell into conversation with a correspondent for a major national newspaper, who says the criticism that Campaign Desk engages in sometimes reflects an ignorance of the wretched working conditions of the traveling press. “It’s good for you to be here to get a sense of what it’s like,” said the correspondent, who complained of constant deadlines and difficult working demands. “Some of the stuff you whine about nobody having fact-checked, it’s because it happened at nine at night at a fundraiser.” (Perhaps unsurprisingly, we don’t buy this argument; while we’re sympathetic to deadline pressure and fatigue, the advent of the Internet has made it easier than ever to fact-check a candidate. And getting it right — regardless of the time of night — is surely one of a reporter’s most crucial tasks.)
Nonetheless, many reporters seemed resigned to the notion that the system makes it nearly impossible for them to consistently do everything they’d like to in a story. “You get it as right as you can in the time that you have,” said The Washington Post’s Balz. “When you explain to a reader the conditions under which you’ve written a story, they’re much more understanding that it’s not as complete as they want.”
The press was led through a dining room and a back hallway into the press filing area, which had been separated by a curtain from the “Kerry-Edwards Victory Fund Reception” underway in the ballroom. There were rows of tables with phones, outlets, and Internet access, as well as a dinner spread of chicken, Caesar Salad, mixed vegetables, pasta, and an array of deserts. Smooth jazz meant for the reception was piped in from speakers in the ceiling; a few members of the press corps snuck into the reception to grab a beer or glass of wine and then ducked back. A pool report came through saying that Kerry, frustrated by the traffic, decided to walk to the hotel, though he was running late. There is “colorful video of Kerry walking and greeting people,” says pooler Becky Diamond of MSNBC.
Terry McAuliffe emerged to warm up the crowd, announcing that between the reception and a dinner to be held afterwards, $4 million had been raised that evening alone. The donors went crazy at this news, but the cameramen and reporters who had made their way to the elevated platform on the other side of the curtain didn’t pay much attention. When Kerry and his wife came out, two sound guys came back to the filing area and held their microphones up to the ceiling speakers, which were broadcasting the speech; they kept switching hands as their arms got tired from holding up their mics. Kerry fired up the assembled faithful, but stumbled, literally, at the end, tripping over a box on his way from the stage. Most of the big name reporters missed it, however; they were already hunched over their laptops behind the curtain, listening with one ear as they polished up their A1 pieces for the next morning.
It was about 8:00 PM, and Kerry still had one more speech to go. Big-name donors were arriving for a dinner with the candidate, an event scheduled to go until 9:30. The ballroom slowly cleared out, but most of the traveling press corps stayed in their seats. Next to one reporter, a plate of chicken and vegetables sat untouched, slowly cooling in the ballroom’s dim light.
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.