Cry-Baby Reporters Sidelined On Campaign-trail

[Warph]

Campaign-trail reporters sidelined
By MIKE ALLEN & CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 9/18/08 4:53 AM EDT   

The flocks of campaign reporters who fly around the country with the presidential candidates have been more sidelined in the 2008 campaign than any in generations, sealed off from any meaningful access to either Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

On Air Obama, reporters gawk at him moving around up front, talking with aides or on a cell phone, but can only guess what he is saying or thinking. On Straight Talk Air, the flying McCain campaign, aides draw the curtains so that not even glimpses are possible.

Not only do the reporters have little interaction with the candidates, but increasingly they are having little impact on the broad campaign narratives and daily story lines that supply most voters with their impressions of the candidates.

That's more often taking place in cable studios or on Web sites far removed from the ceaseless grind of the press bubble — in which reporters schlump on and off the plane, in and out of buses and gymnasiums-turned-filing centers, several times a day, dozens of times a week.

A combination of technology and iron message discipline by heavily centralized campaigns has consigned these reporters – once the storied "boys on the bus" – largely to feeding off the public material available to almost anyone over the Web, with very little interaction with the next president of the United States.

McCain has not spoken to the press corps that follows him in five weeks, or invited national reporters onto his bus in more than two months. When reporters asked McCain's traveling adviser, Steve Duprey, to bring the candidate back to talk to them, Duprey went up to the front of the plane and returned – wearing a McCain mask.

And Obama is available to the press corps in spurts – most recently, for an availability in Ohio eight days ago. He has had five press availabilities in the three weeks since the Democratic convention, several of them focused on Hurricane Gustav.

Since the dawn of campaign planes, print reporters were protective of their seat assignments, since those closer to the front had a better chance of asking a question if the candidate strolled back.

But in a sign of the times, Obama reporters in recent weeks have spread out to the empty rows, confident that there would be nothing to see up front.

"The access gets worse and worse with every campaign cycle, and candidates get more and more controlled," said Richard Wolffe, who is senior White House correspondent for Newsweek and has followed Obama for two years. "This campaign picked up where the Bushes left off, and the Bushes picked up where the Clintons left off."

Wolffe said he finds Obama more accessible than John F. Kerry when he was running in 2004, "but you don't have the Bobby Kennedy-style of access. So the challenge is to report around that. It's no different than covering the White House." At least with a campaign, he said, reporters are "physically in the same place as the candidate."

So reporters gripe among themselves, wondering why their news organizations pay tens of thousands of dollars to be shut out.

Officials of both campaigns said they had become exasperated with what they consider the petty controversies or insider minutia that is the obsession of the on-the-plane reporters, and didn't want to take a chance of creating a story that would override the story they were trying to tell with their staged, scripted events.

Obama aides have said he has been willing to come back to the press cabin to chit-chat off the record, but the reporters have been reluctant to agree to that, since they aren't able to get their questions answered on the record at other times in the day.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13559.html