To enable Seth Mnookin to write his disappointingly mediocre “Feeding the Monster,” a behind the scenes look at the Boston Red Sox, the ball club granted Mnookin “all access” to the team and its backroom operations for a couple of seasons. Although the book fails to live up to its promise, Mnookin does offer this gem of an insight:
Much of the time, reporters are playing a defensive game (hanging around the locker room). They’re there because they want to make sure their competitors don’t get an exclusive by witnessing a juicy scene, even though many of the juiciest will never see print. Ballplayers will occasionally joke about needing to figure out a way to get tickets to that day’s game for both a wife and mistress, or openly mock former teammates (and supposed friends) who have the misfortune of having a blunder broadcast on the clubhouse’s flat screen television, or speculate about this or that players reliance on steroids. None of this sees the light of day. If a beat reporter were ever to print any truly salacious details, he would be frozen out and would find it almost impossible to continue to cover the team.
If you just finished reading that quote and thought of the analogy between the 4th Estate’s efforts covering the Red Sox and CNN's covering Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, give yourself a gold star. But that’s not what I really want to discuss here. I want to talk about how you can read reports that you know aren’t telling you the whole story, and still be well informed.
EXPLICIT IN MNOOKIN’S ANALSYSIS is that the Red Sox players had the ability to make a beat writer’s job undoable if that’s the direction they opted to go in. There’s actually precedent for this.
In 1986, the Boston Globe’s Ron Borges revealed shortly after the Patriots’ historic drubbing in Super Bowl XX that much of the team spent the week in New Orleans prior to the big game getting coked up. What’s more, this wasn’t a change in habit for the Pats. As a team, the Patriots had an enormous drug problem.
Borges’ exposé obliterated any good feelings from the team’s surprisingly successful season that might have survived their Super Bowl humiliation. It also broke the tacit agreement between the press and the players that Mnookin references.
When Borges returned to cover the Patriots the following season, his job was indeed undoable. The Globe had to reassign him. If I remember correctly, it took the better part of a decade before Borges could return to covering the Patriots. Playing armchair psychiatrist, Borges’ subsequent efforts on the Patriots beat suggest he remains embittered over the experience. While the rest of the national media fawns over the modern Patriots’ incredible record and professional manner, Borges has reliably been the media’s turd in the punchbowl the past five years.
POLITICIANS CAN’T DO AS THE PRO ATHLETES DO. However grand it is to contemplate, there is no way George Bush’s government could excommunicate the New York Times or the Washington Post. In spite of her ever-increasing obnoxiousness and partisanship, Helen Thomas remains a lumpy fixture in the White House press corps.
Yet while they lack a stick, politicians do have a carrot. If John McCain just popped into your mind, give yourself another gold star.
For over a decade now, McCain has played the national media like a Stradivarius. We know the press loves McCain. But why? It’s not because of his unyielding position on Iraq. And it’s certainly not because of his ardent pro-life stance. Sure he sticks his thumb in the administration’s eye more than any other Republican this side of Lindsey Graham, but the press was in his corner long before this administration came to town.
McCain won over the press by treating its members as his friends. He gave them access that they could only dream of with other pols. He let down his figurative hair with them. Covering McCain was by all accounts a lot more fun than covering any other politician. The guys (and gals) on his bus openly pulled for his success. Where Bush could hardly utter a malaprop without his press corps putting it on front pages across the land, McCain’s press corps exalted him at every chance.
Whether or not there was an implicit threat to the reporter who might feel tempted to report something unflattering regarding McCain, I’ll leave that conclusion to your own level of cynicism or lack of same.
MY POINT ISN’T TO CONDEMN THE MEDIA, although I’m always game for highlighting its hypocrisy. My point is that what you read in the papers, history’s first draft as its authors pompously refer to their efforts, seldom reflects the whole story and often isn’t even an accurate story.
So how is a news gatherer to decipher the truth? The key, my friends, is triangulation. Friendly reporters and hostile reporters as regards a particular subject usually have their own agenda that goes beyond mere reporting. But if you combine their reports with your own good sense, you can usually figure out what’s going on.
A quick example: Harry Reid spoke to the New York Times today and said, “Haven’t we moved beyond that?...Haven’t we moved beyond the fact that Republicans are trying to save us from the terrorists and Democrats aren’t? I think we’ve moved beyond that.”
Obviously Reid’s sentiment is asinine, even by his lofty standard regarding such things. An entire midterm election is being fought on the very matter that he blithely insists we’ve moved beyond. But don’t look for any such critiques or even a follow-up question in the Times’ report. Such honesty could result in the Times' expulsion from the Democrat’s metaphorical locker-room.
I can also tell you from personal experience in reporting stories for The Weekly Standard, there is a very human tendency to want to reward cooperative witnesses with decent treatment. Most savvy people understand this, which is why they play nice when the press calls. In all the reporting I’ve done for the Standard, I only dealt with one downright rude and unpleasant interviewee. Guess what? He was a member of the press. If we had been in the same room instead of speaking on the phone, the temptation to dope-slap him would have been well-nigh irresistible.
Implicit in this triangulation strategy is that to really know what’s going on, you have to read sources that are unpleasant to you. Hey – no one said being a well informed citizen would be easy.
Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.