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Part I
Election Journalism
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1
Did Twitter Kill the Boys on the Bus?
A Report from the Romney Campaign in 2012
Peter Hamby
The 2012 class of reporters made their 1988 forefathers look like Mötley CrĂŒe. In 1988 reporters still only had to file stories once orâgasp!âtwice a day, and sometimes for the Sunday edition of their papers. CNN was alive, but cable news was not the hungry beast it is today. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and chairman of Twitter, was 11 years old.
Thanks to an evolutionary mish-mash of Drudge, blogs, cable, Politico, BuzzFeed, Twitter, and a general migration of journalism toward the web, campaign journalism in 2012 was a culture that rewarded hustle, impact, and âwinningââeven when it came to the most incremental of stories. Plenty of cocktails were consumed, but work was the most intoxicating element of the trail.
Print reporters still had to file day stories for the next morningâs paper, but the notion of a deadline was just thatânotional. To cover a campaign in 2012, a reporter had to be always-on, tweeting with gusto, filing multiple blog posts per day and preparing for television live shots and âphoners,â all the while fielding calls or emails from editors and desperate for nuggets of news in an environment that was often devoid of content. And if you embedded in one of the candidateâs campaigns, you also had to shoot and transmit broadcast-quality video.
The campaign trail today attracts reporters with the kind of metabolism to thrive in this new world order. To the dismay of the Romney campaignâand their Obama counterparts in Chicagoâthat meant their press retinue was young and, in their eyes, ill-equipped to cover the most far-reaching and momentous story in the country.
Ashley Parker, one of two New York Times reporters assigned to cover Romney, was 29 for most of the campaign. Philip Rucker of The Washington Post was 28. Most of the television embeds were even younger. Many of the reporters in the press pack were covering their first presidential campaign, but some had covered previous ones and most, including Parker and Rucker, had experience covering politics in other contexts.
Both the reporters on the bus and campaign they were covering would find themselves struggling throughout 2012 to adapt to a treacherous media obstacle course that incentivized speed, pettiness, and conflict, leaving little room for goodwill or great journalismâbut plenty of tweets.
The Gathering Place
For campaign reporters on and off the plane, Twitter was usually the first iPhone app they opened bleary-eyed in the morning, and the last one they peeked at before falling asleep at night.
Everyone in politics, it seemed, was on Twitter: journalists, editors, pundits, campaign managers, television producers, bureau chiefs, flacks, pollsters, activists, lobbyists, donors, wives of donors, daughters of donors, hacky operatives, buffoonish down-ballot candidates, cousins of direct mail specialists, interns desperate for retweets. Even Dick Morris was on Twitter.
âI feel like for covering the campaign, [Twitter] was part of being part of the conversation and doing your job,â said Ashley Parker of The New York Times. Parker and many of her colleagues on and off the campaign plane came to regret the way Twitter affected newsgathering and the tone of their coverage, but in the heat of the campaign, it would have been malpractice to ignore the social media service for more than a few hours.
When political news broke, Twitter was the place to find it. Top officials from the Obama and Romney campaigns would joust, publicly, via tweet. When news producers back in Washington or in New York were deciding what to put on their shows, many looked first to their Twitter feeds.
âTwitter is where that central conversation is taking place,â said Ben Smith of BuzzFeed. âItâs not that Twitter is where youâre discussing the news. So much of it is actually happening on Twitter. It was just the central stream of the conversation for everyone.â
Jonathan Martin of The New York Times, who uses the service to share news, tweet political trivia and swap food tips with other frequent travelers, agrees:
Itâs the gathering spot, itâs the filing center, itâs the hotel bar, itâs the press conference itself all in one. Itâs the central gathering place now for the political class during campaigns but even after campaigns. Itâs even more than that. Itâs become the real time political wire. Thatâs where you see a lot of breaking news. Thatâs where a lot of judgments are made about political events, good bad or otherwise.
Twitter consumed the political class, especially the media, throughout the campaign battles of 2011 and 2012. Among reporters, the pressure to join was immense, even if some of the reporters signing up eyed it warily.
âI think there is a feeling on the part of some folks that if Iâm not tweeting, Iâm not in the game, and my voice isnât being heard,â said longtime Washington Post reporter Dan Balzâa Twitter user, but a cautious one. âSo much of what we write never quite gets read. At least with tweeting youâve got an inside audience.â
Twitter launched in the summer of 2006 but took almost three years to reach critical mass in political circles as early users struggled to figure out the point of sending out 140-character bursts of information. Among the early adapters were a young class of web-savvy political operatives and activists, many of them in the conservative movement, who saw it as a way to connect and share information with like-minded people.
A handful of reporters began using Twitter in 2007, but its reach within the political class was limited, and so was its impact on the presidential race the following year. By the end of 2008, however, younger reporters in Washington were rushing to sign up, in part as a way to find news and information faster than their older colleagues in the business. The service also offered a means for up-and-coming reporters to push their stories and report into the Washington bloodstream, bypassing the traditional pathways up the Beltway media ladder and enhancing their âpersonal brandsâ on the way.
For talented journalists this was a blessing. Twitter was a meritocracy. Smart reporters who hustled and had a knack for breaking news or delivering incisive, informed analysis thrived on Twitter and were rewarded with promotions, TV bookings, or even columns at the stolid news organizations they once derided.
Twitter was also the great corrector. Bad reporting was, generally, mocked or debunked with great speed.
And for consumers exhausted by hackneyed Washington viewpoints and lazy reporting, the discovery of new voices, both in journalism and politics, was refreshing.
âSomeone whoâs young but has an edge and a voice and an ability to cut through and be concise can absolutely break out, especially if theyâre funny,â said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama White House spokesman. âItâs good to cut through the roving, musical chairs game of people that go on Meet the Press or on those Sunday show political panels who have a perspective that is often entirely colored by the Clinton administration or the Bush administration or whatever their past experience was that isnât necessarily anchored in the reality of today.â
Veteran journalists remained skepticalâa few still refuse to sign upâbut by the time Politicoâs Mike Allen slugged the February 19, 2009 edition of his morning âPlaybookâ note with the headline âWashington-a-Twitter,â the service had already caught fire in the green rooms, lunch spots and U Street watering holes where political gossip was being shared.
âSocial networking programs tend to tear through communitiesâhigh schools, upper levels of mediaâat exponential rates, and Twitter has now fully arrived in Washingtonâs media scene,â Smith, formerly of Politico, wrote that same week in a blog spot titled âTwitter solidifies grip on Beltway.â
The Golden Era?
Twitter is here to stay. Whether this is good or bad for politics and political journalism depends very much on who you talk toâtheir ages, their affiliations, their experiences in the news business, or their roles in the political universe. The answer is most often a qualified one.
âTwitter is a really imperfect medium,â said Maggie Haberman, a senior reporter for Politico. âI use it. We all use it. But the reality is that 140 characters is not ideal and I donât think that anybody would argue that it is.â
There are plenty of skeptics and evangelists standing on both sides of the Twitter debate.
Tim Miller, a GOP operative and former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, remembers being a college student starved for updates about the 2000 presidential campaign, but with only limited resources to find them.
âThe only information a 19-year-old political junkie like me could get on the campaign was from one random politics blog I stumbled upon, Judy Woodruffâs TV show on CNN, stodgy newspaper coverage, or Iâd have to go to the library to read a weeks-old copy of the Weekly Standard,â he said.
Now, he argues, we are living in âthe golden era of political news,â where consumers have at their fingertips polling data, an array of viewpoints, behind-the-scenes reporting and the ability to follow a campaign minute-by-minute on Twitter. Miller, whose job is to sift through a digital avalanche of news to construct a narrative that he can peddle to the media, thrives on having as much information as possible.
âOur current political information environment is an unqualified benefit for voters and our democracy,â Miller said. âTo complain about the triviality of Twitter and glorify the golden era of journalism is ridiculous. For starters, there was no such thing. Letting a bunch of cranky old white men determine what they deigned worthy of the massesâ ears only served them and the ruling elites who were in on the joke.â
But reams of studies have shown that a byproduct of this free-flowing information, on social networks and other media platforms, is an increase in partisanship, as like-minded communities of people silo themselves in their preferred news bubbles. Conservatives are ...
