independiente, capítulo ciento y cinco
The Campaign
Chapter 19
I read the news today, oh, boy
Reporters show up for work every day, whether there’s news or not. The local beats always offer something to write about––crime and potholes are eternal. But if you’re a political reporter, or a member of the punditry, you may have to get creative––you gotta write something.
At the same time, if it’s August in Texas, actually getting out there and hitting the pavement to find the stories can be a wilting prospect. The handwriting may have been on the wall five years ago, but the awful carnage had not yet started––few could foresee just how deep the cuts would go, or how many jobs in journalism were going to simply vanish. It was therefore still possible in 2006 to encounter a species nearly extinct in 2011: the lazy reporter.
No kidding: one time, I took a call from a reporter from a fairly large paper––it wasn’t meant for me, I just happened to be walking by the reception phone:
“Say, what’s the website for Kinky’s campaign?”
Of course, that was below and beyond, but at the time I was quick to make a cynical assumption about the general quality of the members of the Fourth Estate. No surprise there––the relationship between political campaigns and the media is textbook dysfunctional: mutual need and loathing.
For most of the time since the campaign, I’ve worked for a major metropolitan newspaper; I’ve lived and breathed on both sides now, and the combined experiences have softened my views of both politicians and reporters. Regardless of affiliation or ideology, most in both professions are trying hard to do a good job. That may be hard to believe, but it’s true. And within the larger circle of the well-intentioned, there’s a smaller (but bigger than you might think) circle of talented, hard-working people. At her core, a good reporter is neither liberal nor conservative so much as she’s skeptical. Good politicians (by which I mean people effective at governing), regardless of the necessary noises they make to satisfy the majority they need to keep their jobs, are mainly practical.
But all of them, good, bad and ugly alike, are human, and for a Texas reporter in August, it’s only human to pick up the phone, or get on the Internet, or do just about anything to satisfy the Content Beast in air conditioned comfort.
Don’t get me wrong––tons of good stories come in those ways. But it’s also true that there’s nothing quite like beating the rugs to get the dirt out. For a reporter that might mean poring over unbelievably tedious public records or cowering from gunfire behind a shattered wall––it all depends on the story. Any reporter worth her salt will tell you, though: the best stories are out there. You have to go get them. And you have to be willing to change directions, because often the story that needs telling is very different than the one you set out to write.
From that August, some of the headlines from around the state:
Campaigns take a summer break
You can feel the cool air from the vent in that headline: look up the candidates’ schedules online––gee, they aren’t really hitting it all that hard––call one campaign flack or another for a quote or two to end your piece, and voilà! 350–400 words on A6 and a happy editor because he didn’t have to do a damn thing.
In point of fact, the campaigns weren’t really taking a break. Maybe some candidates were, but if September 1 really looms as the start of the silly season, do you think anybody was taking it easy? The shoe leather, go out and get it question would be: What are campaigns doing to get ready? ––followed by actually visiting campaigns, talking to volunteers––
––melting in the fucking heat.
Strayhorn staff use is raising questions
This was one of those stories that a reporter writes after getting lucky––you have to frame your Open Records request just right––then other newspapers pick it up, then every other campaign issues statements about the inherent evil of the offender, then the offending campaign stonewalls with some sentence that says absolutely nothing, then it turns out the other campaigns are really doing it too––and just like magic, a whole week’s worth of new stories have been generated!
––and hardly anyone outside of political and media circles pays the slightest attention.
The story about Strayhorn using her staff at the state comptroller’s office for campaign work was solid air conditioned journalism. Sifting through piles of documents, teasing the details out that make a story––it ain’t easy, trust me. And in looking more closely at her record, reporters discovered she’d given a 128 million dollar tax refund to Texas Instruments after hearing from their tax consultants, who, oddly enough, had given her more than a million and a half bucks in campaign contributions in four years. Naturally, all the other campaigns immediately started kicking the shit out of her. The Senator went so far as to file a criminal complaint against her, although the AG’s office said it wouldn’t act until after the election. Besides the usual stonewalling, Strayhorn engaged in the classic Austin insiders are out to get me tactic, sort of glossing over the fact that she was as establishment as they come.
I work with some really good reporters––one of them is literally an investigative reporter; that’s his job description, and that’s what he does. Each is very different in their methods––their interview techniques, their research habits, even the way they type––but I’ve noticed one odd trait they all share: when something big shows up, they don’t speed up, they slow down.
The Strayhorn story was a classic candidate for slowing down: go deep into the numbers, ask more questions, develop more sources––another month’s work might’ve proven devastating.
Is it the media’s job to devastate?
Oh, yes.
Instead, the story evaporated, ignored, in the August sun.
Bell attacks governor on state park funding
A classic example of our codependence: one of the candidates’ staff does some research, looking for something to hang on the front-runner, finds a good angle, puts out a press release and the papers run with it. In this case, it was a pretty okay story––fucking with parks is liable to generate more heat with your average voter than, say, a staff-is-being-put-upon-by-its-boss story, which is, after all, generally true of everyone everywhere. If you’re a reporter hoping to keep your shoes from melting on 130-degree pavement, you can see the appeal: the bulk of research is done––all you have to do is call a couple of officials, get comments, ditto the campaigns––A section, page 2! Maybe even page one, if it’s a slow news day. Maybe your assignment editor can force a photographer to drive out to a state park somewhere and take a picture of a broken fence, or something.
It’s easy to see how the park funding story could’ve also been real dynamite with more effort. Perhaps the major story about Texas in the first couple of decades of the new century: structural deficits are causing our state to bleed out. Tracing the origins of those structural deficits (yes, it was known, if not widely reported; Strayhorn herself offered a dire and prescient warning), going out and interviewing park rangers, scouts, cost and benefit analyses, and comparisons with other states’ spending levels would’ve given the story real legs, but, just like the Strayhorn story, it just wandered off, perhaps addled from the heat.
(Our comment on this particular issue? “‘The governor does not have the power single-handedly to increase funding, but he’s not putting pressure on the Legislature to make parks a priority,’ said Friedman spokeswoman Press Goddess.
‘We don’t have an actual (park financing) plan at this point,’ she added.”)
Of course, you could write anything that popped into your fool head about Kinky––he was a summer-shunning reporter’s dream come true. But with just a little work, you could turn that thermostat down––
ELECTIONS ’06: TEXAS GOVERNOR Can Ventura’s team do it again? Aides put a wrestler in governor’s office; now they’re in Kinky’s corner
––and hear that compressor kick in. It’s a legitimate piece of work, as far as it goes––you make an observation: Hmmm, Kinky’s got Adman and The Senator working for him. So you call the campaign, you call Adman––hell, call everybody, throw in a couple of outside and opposition pros, and then you cobble together a nice little think piece about whether the Minnesota Miracle (that’s not exactly what Minnesotans were calling it after Ventura’d been in office for a couple of minutes) could happen in Texas!
Well done, sir!
except…
Ventura’s team?
Get the fuck out of here.
I mean, we were happy to have the media believe that, but the truth is the campaign functioned around and over and through those guys. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone on the campaign that saw them as much of anything beyond a wrong-headed, even naïve obstacle. After Jewford cut his pay, Adman had faded way back, but in convincing Kinky to never ever say anything of substance, he’d done his damage. All that was left for Adman at that point was to produce a trio of the most laughably inane, say-nothing TV spots I’ve ever seen.
The Senator, the Jessie Ventura team member installed as campaign manager, briefly and inexplicably awoke from hibernation to file that complaint against Strayhorn, but soon enough our shared office wall was again vibrating from his snoring.
For my final AC submission:
CANDIDATE CHAT Kinky Friedman
Fourth in a series of editorial board interviews with Texas gubernatorial hopefuls
In this last (2010) gubernatorial election, with perfect (and justified) hubris (is it still hubris if you don’t fail?), Governor Perry flat-out refused to meet with any editorial boards, as telling a reflection on the current state of newspapers as anything in recent memory. There was no penalty––zero––to him for simply refusing to answer questions. Hell, he refused to debate, period––and still stomped the guts out of his opponent, Democrat Bill White.
Lacking, as we did, ten million in the bank (hitting all the TV markets in Texas back then was a million dollar a week proposition), we relied heavily on our candidate’s colorful quotability, so when, in early August, The Dallas Morning News asked Kinky to come in for a chat, we of course jumped at the chance, and the perfect beat-the-heat approach to journalism was achieved: a few questions assembled, the answers then transcribed by some intern. Not a drop of sweat. You can read that bit of work here, if you’re so inclined.
I don’t blame you if you’re not.
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Great journalists are as rare as great alto saxophonists, painters or brain surgeons. But deep cuts in the workforce along with tremendous increases in workloads have scrubbed the profession, creating a remarkably high level of skill among the survivors. I’m sitting here trying to think of one hack among the many reporters I know (and I know a bunch of them), and I’m not coming up with one name. It’s popular to diss the mainstream media, but if you think no one’s reporting anything anymore, you’re simply not reading enough.
The thing that interests me about those stories from that August isn’t their shortcomings––it’s easy to sit here with five years’ perspective and make judgments––it’s how different each one might’ve been. It’s not a knock: news stories are remarkably similar to music gigs––you spend all day getting there, then it’s just over. They come, they go, and like gigs they’re hard to remember for very long.
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As you may have noticed, I’ve been trying to write a factual history of the campaign I worked on. It has ballooned to book length. At times I’ve sweated bullets trying to unpack my heart and brain, and at this point only death will keep me from getting to the end of my story. But I gotta tell you:
I’ve gotten it all wrong.
Based on memory, emails, contemporary news accounts and conversations with others, I’ve tried to tell you a true story, but I’ve missed the capital T Truth of the thing. I sometimes wonder if maybe the only way for a writer to really get to the true is to write fiction, but deep down I know the real truth: I just don’t have the chops.
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A reporter (or her editor) gets an idea for a story. She makes some calls. Some get through, others don’t. She reads a little background, gets a perspective or two. She digs up some documentation––not all of it, some of it––and (clock ticking, the clock is always ticking) sifts through it. If it’s a daily, sometime in the afternoon she starts writing. All too soon (and deadlines are getting earlier and earlier at newspapers as production staff gets cut back along with everybody else) her story will have to be in. By early evening, her work is done. She’s very quickly become conversant with a topic, a mini expert, even, and just as quickly, she’ll move on: new day, new story. And if she’s any good, she’s achieved a version of the truth.
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The biggest headline that early August for those of us who were toiling away on the campaign?
