Certainly, real reporters would tell you that it's important to travel with the campaign -- to "report" on the campaign -- because it's important to build relationships with campaign staff. That way, the staffers will tell you things. Most of those things, we all agree, are lies, or that close relative of lies, spin. That's where they tell you, the reporter, what they want you to write. One step below that is the slightly more honest sort of spin, which is self-deception and rationalization. That's where they tell you, the reporter, what they, as biased participants, personally believe. Then there's strategy, where they tell you what they're doing a day or so before they do it. And then, deep down, you get fingerpointing and personal grudges and honest ruminations, where they tell you what pisses them off. Meanwhile, many of the most intellectual useful articles on the election, like Mark Schmitt's Theory of Change piece (which is worth rereading now that we're on the precipice of an Obama victory), have no interaction with campaign communications staff at all. It's never been clear to me which part of campaign reporting is actually desirable from an analytical perspective. Spin isn't, though it's often reported. Self-deception doesn't seem useful. Strategy comes naturally clear when they actually do the thing they say they'll do. Fingerpointing is, I guess, interesting. But none of this has all that much objective information value. Rather, it has news value, which is not quite the same. It's interesting. The central problem of the modern news media is, of course, supply. 24 hours of cable television a day, political junkies refreshing web sites -- you need more, more, more content. So the campaign pays people to come up with things that reporters can sell to editors and producers. Media organizations then pay to ensure their reporters are in close contact with these people, which assures the media organizations a steady stream of stuff to talk about. Junkies get to read and watch stuff. Everybody wins, sort of.
