Timothy Crouse

I really fascinating look at the journalists responsible for covering the 1972 campaign which ended with Nixon beating McGovern and then later stepping down from the presidency due to watergate. I don't know if I've mentioned this but I want to be a reporter some day and I also am a bit of a political junkie so being a political reporter would be a dream job. I will admit right now that this book could be boring to people if this is not a topic they are interested in but I love this kind of thing. Political reporting is very interesting and Nixon is a very fascinating character as well. I definitely didn't know as much about McGovern or his campaign so that was definitely interesting to read about. I think reading this book right after the 2016 presidential election made this all the more interesting. In one part of the book it was discussed how many of the reporters longed to be able to put more analysis and opinions in their stories and how reads wanted that as well. Now reporters are accused of being too biased. In another part of the book it was discussed how reporters were breaking with tradition and fact checking their stories more and now in this election we saw the complete disregard of facts so it's interesting to see that in many ways we have come full circle back to pre 1972 election coverage so hopefully journalism will have another renaissance and people will appreciate it again because while I agree that journalism and news today can be better I also agree with Jefferson that if I had to choose a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government I would not hesitate to choose the latter and I think that Nixon is a perfect example as to the damage that can be done when the press and its access is restricted and the determination that it will take to uncover the truth. I think books like this are extremely important right now to reminded us that while we might not always like or agree with the press, the press will always be important.… (mehr)

I still consider this a textbook for journalists even though it is somewhat dated (1972).

Back in the '60s observers described the Washington press corps as "wolf pack" journalism. They smelled "news" and chased it together. Their influence on each other was huge and infectious.

This book focuses on the press corps and behind-the-scenes coverage of the Nixon-McGovern campaign. Politics and journalism have both faced radical changes since this book.

Or have they?

Quotes from No. 91 on my random list of favorite and important books I have read:

"To file a story late, or to make one glaring factual error, was to chance losing everything — one's job, one's expense account, one's drinking buddies, one's mad-dash existence, and the methedrine buzz that comes from knowing stories that the public would not know for hours and secrets that the public would never know."

"...Even the most independent journalist cannot completely escape the pressures of the pack."

“Did you feel any sense of disappointment that you failed to affect the election?” I asked Woodward and Bernstein as they finished their coffee at the Hay-Adams.

“No,” Bernstein laughed, “that wasn’t our purpose. We wish there hadn’t been any goddam election. Our stories would have had much more impact in a non-election year, when the White House wouldn’t have had the election issue to work with. They just painted us into McGovern’s corner.

“But we never expected to have much impact anyway,” he added matter-of-factly. “Why? Well, we watched the McGovern campaign fall apart, we knew how the press had been undercut, and we realized one crucial fact about the White House: they know our business and we don’t know their business.”… (mehr)

Very interesting, if now very dated, look at how the media covers presidential campaigns. The focus in the book is on the 1972 presidential campaign (Nixon v. McGovern). The author believed that the media in general was a lot gentler on conservative Republicans than liberal Democrats, and that most newspapers were conservative and Republican in tone. Times, in many ways, have changed significantly. A vanishing ecosystem is described here; this may well have been the last presidential campaign where there were a significant number of afternoon newspapers covering the race; the author goes into a great deal of detail about the mechanics of filing stories. The book also predates, by about 6 years or so, the founding of CNN and the resulting "24/7" news cycle. I also got a sense that Watergate changed the way reporters cover both the presidency and elections, in that reporters now have a sense of game-changing power, whereas the author here shows how bleakly many reporters viewed their craft.… (mehr)