"American Electoral: Seven strange days on the trail with Jack Hitt and Kevin Baker"

"This is also the year that the national media seems to have finally, completely swallowed itself. I call it “The Curse of Teddy White,” the man who first made a cottage industry out of covering the inside game, the “process,” with The Making of the President, 1960, and its five sequels.

Earnest as White was, his coverage was generally about as penetrating as a loofa sponge. Every mainstream candidate he liked came off in a beatific light, including Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. People he didn’t like, such as George Wallace, were mostly ignored. Protestors, such as a group of pickets demonstrating against Barry Goldwater’s Neolithic stand on race at the 1964 Republican convention, were dismissed as “beardies.”

White’s successors have delved deeper and deeper into process, but probed less and less into the issues—all the while making themselves more and more into celebrities.

One could cite any one of a dozen major media commentators who have moved from being reporters to God-like campaign consultants, pompously telling us just how the candidates should be doing everything...

A. J. Liebling said that there were two ways to cover any media circus (and every presidential campaign is but the most rarefied media circus there is): in the thick of it with a push broom cleaning up the mess or from a balcony with a cocktail in hand. We’ll be in the thick of it, with a cocktail.""

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/american-electoral/?clear

This is so enjoyable. It's a day-by-day account of the primaries by two reporters traveling to the different primary sites and stealing lawn signs and making observations like - -

"The prevailing establishment narrative—its Democratic version, at least—is one that Bill did a lot to popularize: the idea that if you “play by the rules,” work hard and get a college degree or two, you’ll make out fine in the globalized economy of the twenty-first century. But not much of that feels true anymore.

If many people all across America seem to have been flirting with what were once considered fringe candidates such as Trump or Sanders, it’s because the establishment’s solutions now ring even crazier."

And -

"Ah, Amtrak! America’s rolling showcase for technological regression. We sped along at a pace just over half as fast as a passenger train in 1930. We had our dinner not in Carolina, but parked in Washington’s Union Station, where the engine was switched from electric to diesel. They had to cut that lights for that, so we ate in full darkness until the porter handed us a glow stick to aid us in aiming our forks.

Our porter merely chortled when we asked her if the wi-fi worked"

FB: this series of reports on the primaries is super enjoyable (Jack Hitt from a past era of This American Life!) "A. J. Liebling said that there were two ways to cover any media circus (and every presidential campaign is but the most rarefied media circus there is): in the thick of it with a push broom cleaning up the mess or from a balcony with a cocktail in hand. We’ll be in the thick of it, with a cocktail."