Following the Herd

...In the beginning, it will be recalled, most political correspondents refused to take Senator George Mc-Govern's candidacy at all seriously...

...Chief among these was the notorious phenomenon of "herd journalism," also called "pack journalism" or "fuselage journalism...

...he cannot let the press secretary tell him or set his clock by the politician's schedule...

...Beyond transcribing the words of public spokesmen, however, newsman certainly should provide a more astute kind of political reporting, not merely during election campaigns but between them...

...There was nothing new about this...

...After his bruising fight against Hubert Humphrey and the devastating Thomas Eagle-ton affair, the reporters following the Democratic nominee seemed to be intent only on showing how disorganized and incompetent he was...

...A case can be made that honest reporting requires more than simply reporting the facts...

...Now Timothy Crouse, a young Rolling Stone writer who covered the men who covered the candidates, has given us a splendid account of the way the newsmen behaved, talked, worked, coped with the artificial quality of campaign happenings-and blew the story...

...The glamor of the press bus and the press plane is too great...

...He campaigned in Peking and Moscow, with Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Soviet Party chief Leonid Brezhnev as his helpers, and let his domestic surrogates do the electioneering...

...Reviewed by David Bernstein Editor, Binghamton "Sun-Bulletin" The past year has been a good one for the press, especially the Washington Post, where the investigative work of two young reporters helped to discredit a President and change the political climate of the nation...

...in 1972, many correspondents tried to write like White while the race was still going on...

...The need to be close to the candidates, just in case someone fires a shot or makes a new point, is too urgent...

...Altogether, it was not the most brilliant year for political reporting, and the reasons emerge clearly in Crouse's sharp-eyed book...

...or 1968, when newsmen were too participatory for their own comfort...

...Some Washington correspondents—for example, Jack Germond, David Broder, Jules Witcover, and Mary McGrory (when she is not carried away by her emotional commitments)—are at their best when they go the furthest in violation of the vacuous theory of objectivity...

...Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's discoveries, most of which did not begin appearing in print until September and October of 1972, had little impact before Election Day...

...In reality, there is not...

...They paid little attention to the issues he was trying to raise and, even though the majority of them ended up voting for McGovern, they did the ultimate hatchet job on him in the name of objectivity...

...The White House tactics were brilliant: Nixon simply ignored his opponent, refused to behave like a candidate, evaded the issues by avoiding personal contact with reporters, and offered the nation a reassuring portrayal of statesmanship rather than partisan politicking...

...The media have been strongly influenced, Crouse notes, by the methods Theodore White fathered for reporting on Presidential campaigns after they are over...

...The political journalist must seek to find out what is moving people...

...For the alternative is to allow official statements on television to become our only source of information...

...On the other side, the correspondents covering Richard Nixon generally gave in, grumbling and frustrated but with sheep-like docility, to the Presidential strategy...

...Throughout, of course, Watergate was regarded as a mere caper, a "third-rate burglary" in the Administration's words...

...Today everyone condemns the herd, as if there were some way to eliminate it...

...Nor can he relinquish the task of reporting what the public thinks to the mechanics who run the opinion polls...

...Unfortunately, too many of the boys are still on the bus when they should be out in the street...

...That led to a preoccupation with the jealousies and bungling that plagued the McGovern staff operation, which was open but harmless, and hardly a line about the Nixon staff operation, which was closed but criminal...

...the practice dates back at least to the 1930s...

...The press corps was concerned, too, about past disasters like 1948, when nobody thought Harry Truman could win...

...They all heard the same set speeches, watched the same crowds, believed the same rumors, exchanged the same theories, and in the end wrote the same stories...

...As Crouse puts it, "A group of reporters were assigned to follow a single candidate for weeks or months at a time, like a pack of hounds sicked on a fox...

...Especially now, with a President wounded and the future of his office in doubt, the newsman's job is not to ride the bus for the duration but to follow his own instincts and common sense...

...Calculating the size of crowds can be fun, yet it means nothing when the crowds are synthetic...

...That is perhaps the basic point of The Boys on the Bus, and it is a very important one...

...The herd grazed in the open pasture, excluded by the barbed wire...

...Once he scored a few upsets in the early primaries, they started taking him so seriously that for a month or two they were attributing to him miraculous powers...

...What was new was the kind of news that the herd sought...

...They huddled around a respected wire-service man to see what he considered the right lead for the day, and they harmonized with variations on his theme...

...Furthermore, newsmen must always be on hand to chronicle the campaign's daily events and to summarize the speeches...

...They read each other's dispatches and were influenced more by what their colleagues wrote than by what was happening in the campaign...

...But praise for the press in 1973 cannot conceal its failures in 1972, most notably its treatment of that year's Presidential race...