I joined McCain during the icy December days in New Hampshire when his confidence about a comeback seemed almost delusional. Inside the steamy windows of his campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, McCain held court on a gray horseshoe-shaped couch at the rear, where we listened with rapt attention...
He leavened policy discussions with funny stories from his school days when some knew him as "McNasty" or reliving his daredevil exploits as a young naval aviator. He was unguarded and charming, occasionally solicitous about our lives.
One winter afternoon when Cindy McCain joined him and he was stuck with three newly engaged reporters, he gave us a 10-minute treatise on honeymoon spots.
"Where did you guys go on your honeymoon," I asked.
"Uhh," McCain said. "Hawaii," Cindy interjected.
"Canada?" McCain joked, pretending to fumble. "I get my marriages mixed up."
Cindy good-naturedly rolled her eyes. "We had a great time," he said, grinning, before telling us about their honeymoon spot.
For several months, he would often lean in and ask the same question: "Did you set a date yet?"
And did Reston glean from her unfettered access to John McCain? That he really didn't like Barack Obama. That Steve Schmidt did a great Dick Cheney impression.
I want to be respectful here because I think daily reporting is a tough, tough job. I think covering candidates and looking for a new angle everyday has to be doubly hard. But this idea that candidates are under some obligation to give reporters access, that there is necessarily a great deal to be learned--as opposed to a perspective to be lost--from being in a candidates good graces, has to go.
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This came up when I was on that New Yorker panel, and folks were mourning the days when McCain was an insurgent straight-shooter, who was principled and above playing politics. But here is the problem with such nostalgia--it's almost always wrong. John McCain has run a standard Republican identity politics campaign, and levied the sort of personal attacks that a lot of reporters probably thought he never would. I don't fault McCain for that. He's a politician trying to win. I fault reporters for buying his line and then selling it to the rest of the world. Worse, it still hasn't occurred to them their gullibility is almost certainly intimately linked to the very thing they most miss--access.
Reston's alleged "gotcha" question was powerful, not because it embarrassed McCain, it was powerful because it gave a deep insight into what McCain had thought about and what he hadn't. Thus I'm befuddled to see her almost blaming herself for McCain pulling back. I don't know where this idea comes from that reporters are supposed to be chummy with the people they cover. The reporter is trying to get to what she sees as the essential narrative. The candidate is trying to get the reporter to buy the narrative they like. These two perspectives are opposed to each other. And yet Reston actually seems hurt by McCain turning his back on the press:
On a recent Sunday during a brief stop at a Virginia phone bank, I got unusually close to McCain in the line of people waiting to shake his hand.I don't understand this. Are we supposed to be friends with these guys? Why are they even on the plane with the candidate? It just seems like an invitation to be get snowed.
Tape recorder out and within a foot of him, I asked if he could talk about his new economic plan, which he was to unveil that week. The man who once asked me about my wedding date returned my gaze with a stare, shook the hand of the strangers to the right and left of me and continued out the door.
I remembered Graham's explanation in January about why McCain spent so much time with reporters. He said that McCain felt too many politicians had become like a guy in a toothpaste commercial -- you knew what he was selling but not what was behind the smile.
What McCain didn't like about other campaigns and wanted to change, Graham continued, was that "nobody gets behind the curtain."
Whether it was McCain's fault or ours, the curtain had been drawn tight.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I'm not sure who coined the phrase - it may have been Andrew Sullivan - but I'll never forget a reference to Fred Barnes's "fellatial" biography of Dumbya Bush. A lot of these so-called journalists get a little access and become worshipers of the politicians they're supposed to be covering. I don't think Barnes knows how pathetic it makes him look. I don't think any of the fanboy former journos do.
A journalism grad student could do a great dissertation on the development of sports reporting and campaign reporting in the 20th century. Up until the last few months, the political media treated McCain like beat writers from the Herald and the World keeping mum about Babe Ruth's syphilis or the Mick and Billy Martin and Whitey Ford going to nightclubs to get wasted and showing up the next day at Yankee Stadium hung over (or still drunk).
Ugh, this infuriates me. The worst example of this is the White House Correspondents' Association, which has no real purpose except to organize the WHC Dinner each year.
Just like sex can ruin a great friendship, schmoozing destroys the relationship between journalist and politician. Seriously, how likely is it that a white house correspondent will ask tough questions to the guy they just had drinks with the night before, or the one that kissed them on the cheek?
I think to fully appreciate Reston's piece, you should have this playing in the background as you read it.
In all fairness, journalists have to walk a tightrope between maintaining relationships and covering their beats. Perhaps the increasing acceptance of subjectivity in journalism has a lot to do with buying the line.
What this little incident should have taught her is how vindictive Senator McCain is, how us versus them his mentality is.
Every news room should put up the classic quote from the late Big Daddy Unruh, speaker of the California legislature, talking about lobbyists: "If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, screw their women, and still vote against them in the morning, then you don't belong here."
If a reporter can't laugh at some candidate's jokes, admire her/his looks, genuinely respect their achievements, appreciate their patriotic ambition, yet still do the damn homework to know when they're full of it and have the guts to SAY so -- then they should find some other line of work.
And don't forget -- it ain't about access, it's about homework.
First, I think we need to distinguish between guys like Fred Barnes and actual reporters. Barnes is a conservative republican who use his position as a journalist the way an intelligence agent uses a diplomatic passport, as a cover for their real mission. In the case of Fred Barnes, the mission is to advocate for the GOP and attack liberals and Democrats. If journalism occurs, it's pure coincidence.
Second, Campbell Brown of all people put her finger on the real issue last night on the Daily Show. There is no real access to political figures and decision makers. In most cases, the pool of reporters that cover Presidential candidates and permananent gaggles like the White House press pool are stenographers. Only when you refuse to be manipulated by access can actual journalism start. What Tim Crouse revealed in "The Boys on the Bus" is still true, and made worse in the intervening years. The campaigns and politicians are too professsional and skilled to allow much deviation from the message, on the record or off.
Finally, I'm not suggesting that reporters and journalists with GOP or conservative views cannot be good reporters. I know several personally who are excellent local reporters with awful political views. What I object to, and what I think is not pointed out enough, is the conservative movement has many of these faux reporters running around and they get treated like regular journalists. News Organizations need to keep them relegated to editorials and not allow them to pretend to be journalists. And I don't mean guys like Olberman and O'Reilly. I mean guys like Kristol, George Will and that crew of inveterate liars and charlatans.
The problems with applying the Unruh principle here is this: are reporters being pressured by editors to get access at all costs, or are they being pressured by editors to do good reporting? Not to get too David Simon here, but if institutional media rewards the wrong kind of reporting, and punishes the right kind, it's not hard to predict how reporters will behave, nor to predict what kind of people will be attracted to journalism in the first place.
Why exactly does McCain dislike Obama? Is it just that he views him as an arrogant young upstart, or is that he thinks Obama is too fluffy, or does he just dislike him becuase Obama is--and was--getting all the praise and attention that McCain had once so enjoyed? I get that he would be annoyed that Obama backed out of whatever finance reform thing they were supposed to work on together--but since neither he nor Clinton nor Guliani nor any of the others is innocent of such behavior during their career, I don't see why that would lead to such dislike.
Here's the worst part of the whole piece:
So McCain's reporters are "protectively" warning journalists about quoting him? That sort of chummy attitude with a politician--which keeps his words from the voters who are apparently too stupid to understand "context"--doesn't signal the death of the Straight Talk Express, it signals a disgust for the American people and the death of journalism.A couple better examples from history, to show context:
1) Wendell Wilkie's mistress -- in 1940 when he got the Republican nomination, which was potentially a very competitive, decisive political year (nobody had ever run for a third term, FDR was not a shoo-in), Wilkie met with the three top political reporters for the major press. He told 'em flat out that he had a mistress, whom he loved, but could not marry because his wife was Catholic and would not divorce. Print that, and I'm finished -- but I'm not hiding anything, boys.
They didn't print it.
2) The HUD scandal under Reagan, led by Sam Pierce, a crony who became HUD secretary. It was -- almost -- broken wide open by a couple stringer reporters for the AP, and a free weekly in New Haven. But it wasn't, for essentially resource reasons -- the wire services didn't (and still don't) invest the dough to actually cover what most of the government does.
3) Watergate itself -- broken by marginal reporters at the Washington Post, NOT by their heavyweight political writers.
The first is an example of, arguably, reporters doing a proper job mediating information. Wilkie's marriage was nobody's business, and the fact that he would tell reporters so is pretty good evidence that he wasn't vulnerable to blackmail. I can't imagine something like that NOT getting published today, though -- and I dunno as we're better off when reporters feel incapable of using their judgment.
Cuz that's what the second example, AND the Reston story demonstrates: a lack of judgment. There are all kinds of examples of reporters lacking basic knowledge of the subj's they seem to be covering, e.g., the financial markets, so I dunno as it is all that persuasive that the key to their quality is whether or not they get to hear what a candidate says in an unguarded moment.
Which is where the third example is most telling: what's going on where everybody is not looking is more likely to be news.
Many people got all up in themselves over the Florida interview with Biden in which the rather robotic blond kept pressing him about Obama being a Marxist. I didn't get why people on the left, even the Obama campaign, were so upset. Biden broke her down ten different ways to Tuesday and laughed at her while doing so. It just made her look stupid and the line she was running even more stupid.
But John McCain could have learned something from following the career of Barry Bonds. I watched this guy play baseball for years, and there never has been a baseball player who has made his teammates better. Average hitters batting before and after all of a sudden had great averages. Jeff Kent, who had been a journeyman at best, turned into a Hall of Famer. There was a hardly a game he played in where Bonds didn't do some little thing to help his team win. Yet he was surly to the press, and, the whole steroids brouhaha notwithstanding, the press nonstop made him out to be the worst team player that ever had picked up a bat and glove. It's not so much that McCain cut off access; it's that he turned into such a grouchy, mendatious old crank.
I'm a bit more sympathetic to the old reporter-McCain relationship. He ran generally open campaigns, spoke off the cuff, and in general answered many more questions than the average politician of either party.
I think the public got useful information out of that. A lot of contradictions did show up as well as statements such as his admission he didn't know much about economics. In exchange they showed more leniency towards possible gaffes because any human giving that much access is going to make some mistakes.
Obviously the campaign McCain is running now is the more traditional closed one and a rather nasty one at that. So why did he switch away from his chummy relationship with reporters? Because they were showing the weaknesses in his candidacy despite the chumminess. He obviously only cared about a few issues and was happy to play to the base on everything else but at the same time his heart and mind weren't in it. That was hurting him.
I think the real problem is when reporters get chummy to get crumbs from a closed campaign. Then they're paying for access but only getting press releases. The Bush administration has managed to master that particular trick.
Anyhow, in terms of informing the public here's how I'd order relationships:
1) Adversarial press - open campaign.
2) Forgiving press - open campaign.
3) Adversarial press - closed campaign.
4) Forgiving press - closed campaign.
Yes, under option #2 the reporters are acting as a filter. In that case, the trustworthiness of the reporter becomes all the more important. Moreover, option #2 is pretty difficult to sustain for candidates that aren't perpetual underdogs. That's why it's pretty rare and why it didn't last for McCain. But I think the ire being aimed at #2 should really be aimed at #4.
He's the guy who didn't pay his dues (in McCain's calculus). Remember, the son and grandson of admirals is going to have a very specific notion of how you get to the top. Now, McCain got the free ride right up to Vietnam - I think he might even admit that. But being a POW was his dues-paying moment. That earned him the next move up. That long slog in the Senate, kissing GWBs and the religious-rights ass for 4 years, this guy has spent at least years 12 years trying to get here and has sold himself out how many times trying to make it.
Obama has moved quickly. He never had to sell himself out to the Clintons or a particular element of the Democratic base. He beat the fundraising catch-22 by bringing in a shitload of money and not looking dirty doing it. He beat the machine without appearing to take a personal hit (I'm sure Obama is hurt by some of what's happened, but he doesn't show it as McCain did). He walked on the stage and could speak to a million people like he was sitting in his living room. He's gifted, accomplished, and comes at you like the Borg.
McCain feels like the guy who worked himself up from the mailroom to middle management and is about to lose the promotion to VP to some newly minted MBA.
I'm a bit more sympathetic to the old reporter-McCain relationship. He ran generally open campaigns, spoke off the cuff, and in general answered many more questions than the average politician of either party.
I think the public got useful information out of that. A lot of contradictions did show up as well as statements such as his admission he didn't know much about economics. In exchange they showed more leniency towards possible gaffes because any human giving that much access is going to make some mistakes.
Obviously the campaign McCain is running now is the more traditional closed one and a rather nasty one at that. So why did he switch away from his chummy relationship with reporters? Because they were showing the weaknesses in his candidacy despite the chumminess. He obviously only cared about a few issues and was happy to play to the base on everything else but at the same time his heart and mind weren't in it. That was hurting him.
I think the real problem is when reporters get chummy to get crumbs from a closed campaign. Then they're paying for access but only getting press releases. The Bush administration has managed to master that particular trick.
Anyhow, in terms of informing the public here's how I'd order relationships:
1) Adversarial press - open campaign.
2) Forgiving press - open campaign.
3) Adversarial press - closed campaign.
4) Forgiving press - closed campaign.
Yes, under option #2 the reporters are acting as a filter. In that case, the trustworthiness of the reporter becomes all the more important. Moreover, option #2 is pretty difficult to sustain for candidates that aren't perpetual underdogs. That's why it's pretty rare and why it didn't last for McCain. But I think the ire being aimed at #2 should really be aimed at #4.
I'd also say that the larger problem is emphasis on campaign/press release reporting. The best investigative stories won't come from access but by finding ways to the facts that aren't being mediated by the candidates or their spokespeople.
John McCain has run a standard Republican identity politics campaign, and levied the sort of personal attacks that a lot of reporters probably thought he never would. I don't fault McCain for that. He's a politician trying to win.
This crystalizes a thought that's been tumbling around in my brain: In 2000, I shook my head as all those IA and NH voters said of Kerry "He seems like he'd be electable." They didn't love him, but they thought he could win a general election. Of course, even his base viewing him strategically rather than as an inspiration illustrates a lot of Kerry's troubles.
I wonder if a lot of Republicans, famously unenthused about their choices this year, were making a similar strategic pick: In an off-year, McCain can run as a centrist who appeals to independents and to moderates in both parties; that might be enough to overcome the advantages to whomever the Dems picked. And then McCain went nuts and tried to play to the most wingnut part of the base when everyone was expecting a straight-talk express, tons of town meetings and good press and affable guy who could answer anything campaign. I was certainly one of those, in the primary, saying "Wake up, the Rs have nominated McCain, a man with a proven attraction to independents and democrats, the Dems need someone who can draw more than half the base!" I went with the cw that McCain would run as a conservative Democrat. Watching what his campaign turned into has been stunning.
Remember, the son and grandson of admirals is going to have a very specific notion of how you get to the top.
Specifically, by being born there.
T-NC, there was another story that ran on the same blog today, by a reporter following the Obama campaign. I'd love to get your take on it as well:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-peter28-2008oct28,0,6187999.story
Forget access, or barbecues or all the dirty jokes and shared drinks in the world--do you think, just maybe, the reporters have "never seen this side of McCain" or think he's a "changed man" because they've never seen him run against a democrat before? Congratulations press, you fell in love with a guy because he came off good running against George W Bush. God they're dumb sometimes
All I ask is that after such egregious lies this campaign reporters start to enforce the line between spinning - making your best case in the gray areas - and outright lying - saying black is white.
... when the press and John McCain used to exchange cupcakes, read Tiger Beat, and then strip down to their undies and have a tickle-fight.
Ewwwwwww! Nightmare fuel!
I think he only heard the word "Viagra" and went off, as some offense to his manhood. Kind of like how Chelsea Clinton went off on that kid who asked a question that was about Hillary's reaction to pressure, not Monica Lewinsky herself.
“I wonder if a lot of Republicans, famously unenthused about their choices this year, were making a similar strategic pick”
I agree with the “lack of enthusiasm” part but not the “strategic choice” part.
My opinion is that McCain was simply the “D” choice. As in grade school tests from years ago, “D”, none of these.
The reason why McCain’s campaign was nearly dead in the fall of 2007 was that no one was really enthusiastic about his candidacy.
Frist and Allen were the favorites in the aftermath of ’04. Frist hurt himself badly with the way the Dems took Congress in ’06 and Allen…well, we know what happened there.
Romney was the superstar coming out of the Iowa Straw Poll in the summer of 2007, surprising everyone in how conservative he had suddenly become. But he’s a Mormon, so he had to tack far, far to the right in order to secure enough social conservatives. But he couldn’t appear believable enough to the rest of the GOP electorate since his foray into Massachusetts politics had put him to left of every big-name national Republican since Gerry Ford circa 1976.
Guliani got a whole lot of press but his poll numbers were almost totally from name recognition. Even if he could have gotten the national GOP, (or the various regional GOP groups), to swallow his pro-choice positions, there were he gay rights positions, his public divorce/adultery drama, his cross-dressing and…he’s Catholic. People talking about him as a serious candidate were, in retrospect, deluding themselves.
Huckabee was a dark horse going into Iowa but he shouldn’t have been. The Iowa GOP is only recently but now totally controlled by the religious right. Huckabee was charismatic as hell in addition to having the conservative evangelicals in his back pocket but was far too economically populist for the national party.
Thompson seemed to be the party’s savior; no clear weakness and more importantly, no enemies in any branch of the party. (Remember poor Tommy Thompson having to repeat in '07 that he was the “only” Thompson in the race?) But as shown during all but one of the debates, Thompson realized as soon as he started campaigning that he would have rather stayed on TV.
McCain was just the last man standing. It wasn’t all that strategic in that few were with him until it became clear that he was the best that the GOP could do in 2008. He had ticked off the religious right with his screed against Robertson and Falwell in ’00, just as he had ticked off the economic conservatives with his opposition to Bush’s tax cuts in ’01. But he ate enough crap for both groups by ’04 and he was always with the neo-cons. So McCain was acceptable, nothing more. Well, until Palin came on the ticket anyway.
The GOP is so far to the right, (the part of the GOP that calls the shots anyway), they can’t imagine a conservative not winning vs. what they perceive to be a liberal Democrat.
I don’t think McCain is nuts though. I think he is a strong conservative who pretended to be a moderate conservative in order to win the GOP nomination in ’00. He lost and decided to become what he always was to begin with, a status quo GOP pol. It’s the media who can’t come to grips with the fact that they, (along with a good portion of the country), got taken for a ride on the “Straight-Talk Express” in ’99 and ’00. I mean, was he still trying to fake being a centrist in ’07, aside from bringing back the actual, physical bus itself? Didn’t “maverick” John McCain die once and for all during the 2004 Republican convention?
McCain had to morph from folksy guy into the Great Man Narrative of his campaign bios and the Republican Myth of being the heir to Reagan as Uber-Conservative Hero. He had made his investment with the "base" of reporters with badinage, barbecue, and beer for long enough to make him think he bought real loyalty....though it was just laziness and smug satisfaction of feeling "inside." (This was fairly cheap insurance, with Salter and Barnes propogandist-types being sort of free.) The Campaign simply consumed the residue of goodwill too quickly — refusing access, making Palin silent, attacking the media, etc — for this scheme to work. But it did work for a while.
Is this at all similar to the way embedded reporters end up skewing their stories, relative to reporters who are more on their own? It seems like the same phenomenon--you hang around with someone, see them all the time, and while you will get to know them and their world better, you'll also usually identify with them more. You'll come to see the world more from their perspective.
What happens when an embedded reporter starts writing seriously anti-war stories?
Re: Nuada's lengthy post at 4:33 -
Upon reading it I remembered Bill Cosby's long joke about two old bigots talking about who they hated and why, and at the end of it they were only down to each other on the "unhated" list - and then one of them said to the other, "And I don't like you much, either."
Republicans have become such pedantic, ludicrous assholes that it's hard to imagine how anyone but a gaping void like Dumbya can make them happy. Nuada's observation that Giuliani was unacceptable because he was Catholic is significant, because Rudy is a WORLD CLASS asshole - and the party of assholes wouldn't even give him the time of day.
The last lines of your first block quote aren't actually a part of the block quote. Other than that, I think there is something to be gained from access. Like, for instance, the bungling answer to Reston's "gotcha" question, which we never would've heard had she not had the access she needed to ask the question. Besides more information of that nature, I think you also get more insight into a candidate's personality, and stuff like that matters a great deal. Obama, for instance, is a bit of a cipher to me and a lot of others because nobody's had much access to him.
Hey that link from Christina from the Los Angeles time is fascinating because it illustrates the exact same problem you're talking about from the opposite side.
The LATimes reporter, Peter Nicholas, complains that Obama does not take an interest in his (the reporter's) sunburn or another reporter's engagement ring. Therefore he "offers few glimpses of his true self."
Basically, the candidate in this view are *obligated* to supply the media with a stream of faux-personal encounters and chumminess. That stream of anecdote material, to this guy and a generation of reporters, *is* the candidate's true self.
That this is a profoundly shallow and misguided view of personality is prolly less important than the reporter's complete lack of interest in things like actual national events and policies.
“Republicans have become such pedantic, ludicrous assholes that it's hard to imagine how anyone but a gaping void like Dumbya can make them happy.”
Or Mrs. Palin? In a way, she’s even better as she is a female who doesn’t have a Southern accent. Before the GOP elites are forced to actually give up their worn-out politics and tactics, they’ll try to repackage them in something they think is more appealing. All they need is a relatively blank slate with more ambition than knowledge. I think Palin fits that bill perfectly
“Nuada's observation that Giuliani was unacceptable because he was Catholic is significant, because Rudy is a WORLD CLASS asshole - and the party of assholes wouldn't even give him the time of day.”
I think it’s still far better to be a conservative evangelical Protestant if you are running for the Republican nomination, due to the religious right’s influence. But being Catholic is not a 100% deal breaker; it in of itself is only a slight negative. Catholics, due to the increasingly militant stance on abortion the US church is taking lately, aren’t nearly the bogeymen they used to be in such circles. (Now if Roe V. Wade was suddenly overturned, the CEP and RC alliance would shatter overnight. No issue, not even gay marriage, provokes your average church-going Catholic anywhere near as much as legalized abortion.)
Rudy’s real problem was his own history, both political and personal; his Catholism just made it that much worse. McCain, a divorced adulterer with a slightly ambiguous position on abortion, made sure to switch his religious affiliation from Episcopal (AKA “Catholic Lite”) to good ol’ Baptist long ago. That got him a pass. Now if Romney was a Conservative Evangelical…..I doubt he could have been stopped until he got the nomination.
Still, as we saw in Iowa, give the RR a choice between a far-right Evangelical (Huckabee) and a far-right Catholic (Brownback) and they’ll pick the Evangelical hands-down.
I don't know if they got "taken for a ride", but there is a tendency to think "s/he's just like me" when you get to know someone. In terms of journalists "just like me", as an average, means basically a moderate who's liberal on social issues. McCain's record or views didn't really fit that, but they wanted to believe it. So I think they either fooled themselves or were "taken on a ride" they wanted to take.
Back to the article that inspired this interesting discussion: Is it bad sportsmanship to wonder how much Reston's status as a third-generation insider plays into this sense of personal betrayal? (Daughter of author James Reston Jr., granddaughter of NYT icon James Reston.) I'm always struck by how often the family-business aspect crops up in these circumstances.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/10/29/reston/index.html
For a typically good take on this from Greenie.
These so-called journalists need to decide, once and for all, what they want to be when they grow up. Why we'd lend credibility to any "journalist" who would self-censor in order to feel chummy with their subject, place themselves in a position to get their feelings hurt or "test" a subject's sensitivity by self-disclosing is beyond me. Do any of us think or pretend that our clients are our friends? Clearly, our ethics would be severely compromised if we presented ourselves in that manner, as would the quality of the work we performed. It sounds to me like Obama is behaving with consistency, demonstrating self-control and professionalism; he is working, and he's not there posing as any journalist's buddy. They are politicans, for christ's sake!McCain 's behavior sounds like it's congruent with his character as well- he gets mad and blames others when he makes errors or looks ignorant/foolish.What more do we think we'll learn about these candidates prior to one of them actually performing the job of president?
I think it's important and journalistically sound to be judicious with material gotten from a candidate like the "old' McCain. Judicious means don't blow anything out of proportion... a stumble or swear word slipping out, maybe an off color joke, whatever ... doesn't necessarily need to be front page news, especially when you consider that the other guy likely does the same things, but won't let the people's surrogates in the press corp see it happen.
More importantly this whole issue brings me to another case of 'why the hell are we here?' Considering the waste of time that 99% of campaign reporting is, why is anyone except the wire services covering the day to day campaign stuff?
It's incredibly expensive to send a reporter out with a presidential campaign, and even the best of them rarely provide anything that I couldn't get from the AP report. Let the day to day campaign stops be handled by the wire services, a pool camera, and the local reporters from wherever the candidates are touching down. Then take all the rest of the traveling campaign press corp, and let 'em go do some enterprise reporting. The public will learn more important news, and the publishers/owners/editors will get exclusive stories that actually drive audiences (and hence, money), instead of the commodity news that everyone's got.
Coates is right: open access creates more bad reporting than it does good. He does not mention the main reason to avoid becoming chummy with the object of your coverage: national politicians are extremely charismatic and most humans fall victim to it. Digging up dirt through traditional journalistic slogging gets us better information (and which is more predictive of future behavior) but it is much less glamorous than the being close to the hyper-charismatic Alpha Male or Female.
We learn more telling information from the National Enquirer and Drudge than from the Boys & Girls On The Bus.