Candy Waites (left, in red blouse) brings latest intel to the nerve center of the Morrison campaign on election night. That's Phil Grose standing across the table facing the camera./Brad Warthen
In the past I’ve mused about the conflicts and confusions that can arise from interactions with newsmakers now that I’m a blogger without portfolio. Simply put, how are politicos supposed to see me when I show up at an event? Now that I no longer represent the MSM, how should they view me: Friend? Blogger? Spy for the opposition?
(Now, before some of you complain that I’m navel-gazing and being self-absorbed in raising this question, allow me to submit that this matters to you. Increasingly, you are getting your information from interactions that are no longer governed by the arm’s-length relationships defined by the conventions of the MSM. Just as surely as the fact that observer and observed interact through the process of observation, the nature of those interactions matter to you.)
This gets particularly confusing when I do what I so often did as a reporter: Go where reporters aren’t expected to go. Good reporters (by my definition) do this regularly. They don’t stand tamely behind a rope waiting to be spoon-fed by the flacks. They go into the back room where the real action is. There’s a scene in “The Paper” in which Michael Keaton’s character demonstrates how to get past the sergeant’s desk and into the heart of a police station “with a clipboard and a wave.” In truth, you don’t need the clipboard. I learned as a young and brash reporter, long ago, that you could get past most barriers by wearing an expression and manner that indicated you belong. (Never, EVER, pause and look around near a gatekeeper; you’re begging them to say, “May I help you?,” which is gatekeeperese for “What the hell are YOU doing here?”)
I’ve kept up this habit over the years. I described such an incident in my infamous John Edwards column that caused such a stir:
I decided to drop by a reception held for then-vice-presidential nominee Edwards at the Capital City Club that afternoon. I had stuffed my press credentials into my pocket after arrival so as to mix freely with the high-rollers and hear what they had to say. (They knew who I was, but the stuffy types who want writers to stand like cattle behind barriers did not.) Good thing, too, because there was plenty of time to kill, and there’s no more informative way to kill it than with the sort of folks whom candidates want to meet at such receptions.
The technique involves blurring the lines, so that you can cross them and find out what’s really going on, what people are really thinking. Back when I was an actual reporter in the late ’70s, I’d wear a loose leather flight jacket roomy enough to let me hide my notebook and camera and mill around in a crowd without immediately getting that, “Shhh… it’s a reporter” reaction. (I wasn’t as well known then in rural West Tennessee as I am now among newsmakers in Columbia.) I didn’t misrepresent myself. I’d identify myself if I were going to quote someone. But it enabled me to perceive the event without distorting it.
But the lines are really blurry now that I no longer carry MSM credentials. An example was when I dropped by Steve Morrison headquarters on election night last week. I’ve bragged about being first with the burst, calling the mayoral election (that it would be Benjamin and Finlay in the runoff) before other media. But the way I got the information made even me a little uncomfortable.
When I walked into the reception area, there was Candy Waites at the desk taking results from a volunteer at one of the polling places. She gave me a slight wondering glance, but had no time to talk. She was taking call after call and running the results into the room shown in the photo above, where a campaign worker was entering numbers onto a spreadsheet, which displayed in real time up on the wall (below).
It occurred to me that maybe Candy thought I was there to see about my check for the ad the campaign had bought on the blog (one reason I had dropped by earlier, from which I wrote this report, was to drop off my invoice). But that wasn’t the case; I was just snooping (the check had arrived at my home earlier that day, as I later learned).
I drifted into the nerve center, where the numbers were being collected and projected onto the wall. (The photo below shows the spreadsheet as it stood at 7:41 p.m., just before I left and filed my Tweet stating that Morrison was out of the runoff. I based it on the numbers, plus the fact that two important boxes still out were expected to go heavily for Benjamin and Finlay.) The guy entering the numbers glanced up and said, “You’re Brad Warthen. You look just like your picture.” I muttered something like, “Yeah, it tends to work that way.” I didn’t trouble him for his name, as he looked right back down at the laptop. He was way busy.
Another friend (and I count Candy as a friend) came in: Phil Grose, who was head of the Executive Institute when I went through that Budget and Control Board program (since cut out of the budget during the Sanford years). Phil’s a good friend of my old boss Tom McLean. He’s not as busy as the other folks; he’s mainly observing, so we exchange a word or two.
When one of the folks in the numbers room says something like, “Hate to say it, but it’s beginning to look like we’re not going to be in it,” I started to report that on Twitter on my Blackberry. A woman rushing in and out says as she passes, with a tone of incredulity, “You’re sending messages?” She’s gone before I look up, and guiltily put away my Blackberry. Last thing I want is for people to see me feeding off bad news that wasn’t intended to be publicly released, but which was being assembled at great effort (a worker at every polling place) for the internal use of the campaign. I think, How would I feel if some unfeeling blogger was looking over my shoulder and telling the world I was failing before I had fully taken that in myself?
One of my oldest friends in S.C. politics, Bud Ferillo, comes in and out of the room a couple of times, giving me a blank, hurried look. Not particularly glad to see me right now. Eventually, I decide to go find out where he keeps going to. I find him in a little office at the back, where he’s staring at a sheet of paper on the wall that has information about each polling place, including racial breakdowns. He’s very distracted. No pleasantries are exchanged. At the same time, he doesn’t tell me to get the hell out, which is something.
(I keep mentioning the fact that I consider these people to be friends — something that a conventional reporter who wants to be seen as following the rules would never want to admit. But if you’re a real human being you do get to be friendly with sources over time. I’m not that close, really, to any of them, and don’t even know whether they would call ME a friend — Bud’s the only one whose home I’ve been to for supper, and that was business. But the relationships have been cordial. I’m on the record, for instance, as believing that Candy Waites’ departure from the Legislature left the state poorer. I like these people. And that would be fine if I had that formal wall that an MSM reporter has to keep it professional. But without that, things feel weird; I feel disoriented…)
I drift back and forth between the nerve center and Bud’s office — just a few steps — a couple of times. I find myself in the position of telling him the latest numbers. He shows interest, but I sort of sense that he’d rather not know some of what he’s learning. Suddenly, I realize why this situation feels familiar: On election night 2000, one of my stops in rambling around town was at the office of Bud’s consulting company, where he and I sat watching the TV for an hour or so, his spirits rising and falling as the lead drifted back and forth between Bush and Gore. Bud, being Mr. Democrat, fervently wanted Gore to win. Me, I was sort of neutral on the subject: We had endorsed Bush, but I had always liked Al, dating back to when I covered him in Tennessee 20 years earlier. (To paraphrase Chili Palmer, I was a Bush supporter, but I was never that into it.)
After Candy came into the nerve center to tell the workers that a box expected to go to Finlay was delayed because of a technical problem (that’s what’s happening in the photo above), I decided to leave. I knew it was over for the Morrison campaign, and I think they did, too, but they were too busy to mourn the fact. I didn’t want to be there, feeding off of them, when they got to that point.
When I got to my truck, I filed my report before driving away, to wit:
Numbers coming in fast at Morrison HQ. It’s close, but looking [like] it might be Finlay & Benjamin… 7:45 PM Apr 6th via mobile web
But even when I got home to my computer, I held back from posting these pictures I had casually taken, because I wasn’t sure of my status when I was taking them. If I had been Adam Beam, would I have been allowed to wander around like that? Probably. These people aren’t the anal types who throw out reporters. But I felt weird about the whole thing. I was glad I’d gotten the scoop, but wondered whether I had improperly exploited the ambiguity of my status to get it. I’d hate for Candy, Phil or Bud to feel like I’d exploited them at a bad moment. Not that I wouldn’t have pursued the information either way, because being a reporter means never being too sorry to get the story.
And now that I’ve written all this, I’m not sure how to conclude. I just thought I’d share, because that’s what blogging is about.
The results, as of 7:41 p.m.
delighted liberals by taking Sarah Palin to task. She was a large part of the trend I remarked up during that election. As a writer commonly characterized as “conservative,” she was one of those I thought was being far more interesting than the liberals at that time — which was why I ran more “conservative” columnists in the last months of that election, much to Democratic readers’ consternation. The lefties were just so giddy, unified and on-message that they bored me to tears. Meanwhile, “conservatives” were divided, demoralized and groping about for truth and meaning — which made them infinitely more worthwhile to read.
WANTS CHANGE!