THE WEIRDNESS OF CAMPAIGN REPORTING.

Michael Hastings, one of the journalists Newsweek sent to embed on the campaign and write their post-election "inside" story, has had enough. He's quit. He's not going to be part of the story, and he's not going to be telling the story. But his time on the campaign trail was an embittering unpleasant experience, and he's written about it for a must-read piece in GQ. He begins with Rudy Giuliani, the candidate he was originally assigned to cover:

The reality is: I quickly realized Rudy was a maniac. I had a recurring fantasy in which I took him out during a press conference (it was nonlethal, just something that put him out of commission for a year or so), saving America from the horror of a President Giuliani. If that sounds like I had some trouble being “objective,” I did. Objectivity is a fallacy. In campaign reporting more than any other kind of press coverage, reporters aren’t just covering a story, they’re a part of it—influencing outcomes, setting expectations, framing candidates—and despite what they tell themselves, it’s impossible to both be a part of the action and report on it objectively. In some cases, you genuinely like the candidate you’re covering and you root for him, because over the long haul you come to see him as a human being. For a long time, this was John McCain’s ace in the hole with the press, whom he referred to as “my base.” Reporters rode along with him, and he joked with them, and that went a long way toward shaping the tone of their coverage. (Last January a group of reporters asked McCain’s staff to make McCain campaign press T-shirts for them.) And because your success is linked to the candidate’s, you want to be with a winner, because that’s the story that makes the paper or the magazine or gets you on TV.[...]Still, I ate meals with staffers and campaign managers. I tried to say things that would make me appear sympathetic to Rudy while not technically lying. (“Wow, he sure seems popular.” “I was in New York on 9/11, and I have to be honest with you, I was glad Rudy was in charge.”) I tried to stay out of any discussion about issues and to just repeat the mantra to myself: I am here to observe and record, observe and record.

Hunter S. Thompson used to have a line that he'd seen "objective journalism" exactly once, and that was on the closed circuit security camera at a Woolworth's. Otherwise, objectivity amidst human beings is an absurd concept. But imagine the sense of disassociation it provokes. You're spending months on the campaign trail. You sleep in a different bed every night, a different city every week. You're far from your family and from your real friends. People are constantly lying to you. You're hearing the same speech, every day, again and again. And you're being told to subsume, to ignore, to choke off, your human and analytical reactions to the events you witness, and instead report them "objectively." What does that do to a man?

It occurred to me, as I sat there watching [my hotel room porn], that jacking off in a hotel room was not unlike the larger experience of campaign reporting. You watch two performers. You kind of like it when one of them gets humiliated. You know they’re professionals, so you don’t feel much sympathy for them. You wish you could participate, but instead you watch with a hidden envy and feel vaguely ashamed for watching. You think you could probably do as good a job or better. You sometimes get a glimpse, intentionally or not, of society’s hidden desires and fears. You watch the porn week after week, the scenes almost always the same, none of them too memorable. The best ones get sent around the Internet.

I've never done campaign reporting for more than a couple weeks at a time. And I've never had to do it straining under the strictures of "objective" journalism. But each time I've gone on the trail, it's been one of the least pleasant experiences of my life. It's lonesome and alienating and artificial. The press corps who become your friends are tired and cynical and unhappy. The campaign is schizophrenically solicitous and mistrustful of you. Every speech is the same, and substance rarely counts as news. You are bored. You are rewarded for noticing gaffes and moments of embarrassment and changes in the attack narrative. You are far from the people you love.I've always imagined it takes a very rare sort of person to endure the trail for any length of time. I have great respect for that sort of person. But it is a very select group, with a very specific set of of character traits. And it is this person who generally ascends up the media ladder to become a "pundit" or nonpartisan analyst. Watch CNN some night: The people tapped to explain the campaign are campaign reporters and former campaign workers. They are folks, in other words, who could endure the endless, braindead, monotony of modern campaigning for some genuine length of time, and have acclimated themselves to the questions and rhythms of campaign life: Who gaffed? Who scored a hit? Who got the soundbite? Who's up, and who's down? Folks who can exist in that world for more than a few weeks at a time are possessed of a very special constitution. But the campaigns are, for us, filtered through the lenses of those people, not through people like Hastings, who prove themselves to be more like the rest of us by dropping out of campaign reporting. It's an understandable state of affairs, but not necessarily a good one.