Wimblehack: Round 3
OWNERS LOVE IT, fans are grateful for it, but the advertisers hate it. It's the scourge and the savior of all organized sports:
Designing a system in which all the contestants have a nearly equal change of winning-like today's NFL, for instance-guarantees spirited play and close competition. But it also deprives the sport of juggernaut teams and dominant stars. It's a trade-off that works fine for football, but has been a disaster, say, for women's tennis or the NBA, which hasn't been the same since the days when the Celtics and the Lakers were perennial locks for the finals.
Campaign journalism is a sport that thrives with a built-in caste system. This is a league that makes its own stars, and part of being a star is sitting at the right table at the cafeteria. It's hard to go far in a tournament like Wimblehack if you sit in the back of the plane, but if you're within breathing distance of the candidates, up front with all the other Heathers, you've got a decent shot. It takes years of mutual backscratching up there to get that really sharp, pointy head you need to succeed on this surface.
That's why there are so few upsets in Wimblehack. Three of the four top seeds made it to the semifinals, and it's no surprise that those surviving seeds represent three of the pointiest heads in the business. The only surprise entrant into the Final Four is James Bennet of the New York Times, who continues to impress. Is he an up-and-comer, the next Federer? Or is he just another Miloslav Mecir-a junkballer who's always a few rounds too lucky?
We'll see. One would hope that luck will have nothing to do with the outcome, and it's hard to imagine it will, judging from this Final Four lineup. In any case, the action from the round of eight:
TUMULTY, THE ONLY female impersonator left in the draw, advances this week for a number of reasons. Press readers may recall that in the first two rounds, Tumulty was characterized as a third-rate sportswriter, a serial poll-humper, an arch-priestess of conventional wisdom, the unrepentant human embodiment of the lowest common denominator, the sworn enemy of all political substance, and, incidentally, ugly. Last week, Tumulty wrote to the Press to angrily complain, "Who are you calling ugly?" Under the subject line, "Mannish?" she wrote a two-line letter:
pre-op version of dave barry? let's see how YOU look when you are 48 and have had two babies.
We were about to send a hurtful, gratuitous response to this when we spotted an article in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, which quoted Stockholm-born actress and sizzling nude-scene star of The Unbearable Lightness of Being Lena Olin as saying, "Now that I'm 48 and have two children, I look just like Karen Tumulty." That was a humbling piece of information for us, so we just shut our mouths in shame, and didn't answer the letter at all. Not content with this victory, Tumulty, clearly concerned about the next round, wrote again the next day:
i'm not writing this week for next week. does that mean i'll have to forfeit, or can you find something you hate from this week's cover on the ground game? the pressure is getting so intense...
Now, in Wimblehack, you advance automatically when you send in faux-sarcastic letters of the "Not that I care, but..." genus in an abject attempt to find out ahead of time if you're going to be savaged in the next issue. Besides, is there anything funnier than a campaign-trail journalist asking for a sneak-peek verdict from a reporter before the publication date? Can you imagine what Tumulty's reaction would be if someone like David Wade or Stephanie Cutter meekly asked for a private preview, three days early, of one of Tumulty's patented, "Kerry: Why Women Snicker" pieces? She'd laugh out a 20-foot hole in the fuselage; it'd look like a scene from Airport '77.
Tumulty also advances because, over the course of a lengthy taxonomic survey of evil campaign clichés last week, the Press was completely flummoxed in its attempts to find one worthy of being called a "Tumulty." The reason for that is that they were all worthy of being called a "Tumulty." Every campaign reporter has something he can call his own. George Will has his unnecessary alliteration, Howard Fineman his boxing/combat imagery, James Bennet the unexplored vestiges of the liner notes to Beowulf. Tumulty is the only reporter with the perfect all-court game. She uses labels like "liberal" more consistently and derisively than Karl Rove; she can't file a single piece that isn't wrapped around a poll; she is more prone than most to imbecilic generalizations like "Kerry's [positions are] more like a kaleidoscope, than like a circle"; and she is really the only reporter on the trail who can be consistently counted on to croak out dire warnings to candidates about the consequences of listening to reason instead of pollsters ("The Kerry campaign at times resembles a floating five-ring circus of longtime Democratic operatives who have all sorts of views? That worked fine when it was up against Howard Dean's homespun Vermont militia. Against Bush-Cheney '04, a disciplined hierarchy run by Karl Rove...it could be a recipe for a landslide").
Like Tumulty, other reporters avoid talking to ordinary people, usually preferring to talk to staffers and pollsters and talking heads. But Tumulty's Time campaign team is probably the first magazine to actually outsource the job of talking to ordinary voters. If you look at the byline of Tumulty pieces, they are usually absurdly long, with five or six reporters contributing to each 2000-word piece (typical Time byline: "Karen Tumulty, With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr. on the road with Kerry; and Timothy J. Burger, James Carney, John F. Dickerson and Michael Duffy/Washington"). A lot of the man-on-the-street stuff naturally comes from these supporting writers, leaving the big gun free to talk to the real people.
That happens in the business and is nothing new; a perk of being a big-timer is that you use assistants to talk to the rabble. But in Time you will sometimes also see a polling agency in the article credits-for instance, Schulman, Ronca and Bucuvalas, which frequently helps out in poll data.
Last week, I called Mark Schulman of SRBI, and asked him if his agency ever provided Time with quotes from respondents in addition to polling data. He said no, although this was possible ("provided we get permission from the respondent"). However, he did note that Time had recently asked his agency's help in recruiting "real people" for its reporters to talk to.
"They said, 'We want to talk to some real people,'" he told me.
"They said that?" I asked. "Just like that? 'We want to talk to real people?'"
"That's what they said," he replied. "I mean, it makes sense, because there's the number, but the numbers aren't the people, of course."
A striking thing for a pollster to say, one would think.
"So where do you go looking for real people?" I asked. "That can't be easy."
"Um, we just get them off the street," Schulman said. "Although in this case, we just sort of called around, asked people we knew, and they put us in touch with some women they knew in the Philadelphia area."
The recruiting Schulman was referring to was actually for a Nancy Gibbs piece ("What Do Women Want?" Oct. 11), to which Tumulty contributed. This sounds like an up-and-coming trend to me: You get the pollster to find "the people," leaving the reporter more time to spend on the plane with the Louis Quatorze crowd. It saves time and money, right?
In any case, see WIMBLEHACK GLOSSARY to learn the final definition of a "Tumulty." She is still seriously ugly and advances automatically, rendering Cal Thomas's desperate, Simon-and-Garfunkel-bashing attempt to advance ("The Third Debate," Oct. 14) meaningless.
IN HIS MSNBC "Web Exclusive Commentary" after the third debate, Howard Fineman made the observation-an observation widely commented upon in the broadcast media in subsequent days-that there were "no laughs but gasps" in the press room when Kerry brought up Dick Cheney's daughter in response to a question about whether homosexuals are born or made.
Now, I've been in filing rooms with that same crowd of campaign journalists Fineman is talking about. I can report that the campaign press will gasp at a lot of things: empty buffet trays, poor hotel accommodations (the cut-rate motel choices of the Dean campaign elicited astonishment among some regulars), the face of Dennis Kucinich, the presence of alternative media, the platform of Ralph Nader.
About the only time the national political press doesn't gasp is when the illiterate president of the United States stands up and for two fucking consecutive years says that we have to invade Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from attacking us with "weapons of mass destruction."
Then, they don't gasp. Then they stiffen up in their seats like altar boys and say, "Really? No shit, Mr. President? Call on me, Mr. President! I'll ask you how your faith guides you in this difficult time! How long should we let the inspections drag on, Mr. President? What about those goddamned French, Mr. President?"
The press room gasps at things like the Kerry lesbian-baiting ploy because it's the kind of vicious celebrity twaddle they're sensitive to, twaddle they consider themselves experts and authorities on. If someone makes what they consider a "mistake" on that turf, they dive on it like pigs converging on a watermelon rind. But if a politician drives the country off a cliff, they sit on their hands, waiting for Zogby and the Brookings Institution to give them their gasping cues. A gasp in the press room is as meaningless as a standing ovation at an Amway convention.
Incidentally, Fineman in that piece also wrote:
"Still, what was Kerry's point in hauling her into a discussion of the pros and cons of gay marriage... Was he trying to say that Cheney should actively oppose it because of his daughter? Cheney and Kerry actually seem to share the same views."
Actually, this isn't the case. Cheney supported the Defense of Marriage act in 1996, while Kerry opposed it. Furthermore, while Cheney says he "personally" opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment, he's still running with and supporting the candidate who favors it. However you feel about that issue, the two men definitely have different stances on it.
As for Zuckman-forget Zuckman. Fineman advances; Newsweek to meet Time in the Final Four.
ANY YOUNG JOURNALIST working the campaign trail for the first time will quickly learn how to spot the New York Times reporter on the plane. Unfailingly, the Times guy is the one sitting in the pole position at the front aisle seat just behind the candidate and his entourage, and in crowds he's the one with the four-foot rod up his ass who pushes everybody out of the way to get to the front because he's the New York Times, goddamnit.
Times reporters are allowed to act this way because of the still-lingering public perception that the paper is some kind of divine standard-bearer for journalistic ethics and excellence. They work hard to maintain this perception. It is clearly part of the Times reporter's job to a) appear at all times to be a walking definition of stringent, humorless professionalism, and b) to radiate contempt for amateurs, interlopers, and trash-peddlers like Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch.
There may have been something to this at one time, but not anymore. No paper is quicker to surf in the wake of some unsubstantiated blog tremor than the Times. The paper does this in a funny way. It gets the blog smear in print by covering the "phenomenon" of the net rumor as though the existence of the rumor itself met their tough newsworthiness standards. This is a nice way to get around the problem of making sure a thing is true or newsworthy before you put it in print. Incidentally, it's exactly what bloggers do.
This has been going on for a while, at least since they were scooped by vile net creature Matt Drudge in the Lewinsky business. Mainstream news organizations have apparently decided in the post-Lewinsky era that they are not going to cede the lucrative media territory of Unsubstantiated Bullshit to amateurs. And so what they do is fly at low altitude, above the fray as it were, and then swoop down and report the hell out of the "phenomenon" as soon as some internet donnybrook gets loud enough to sell papers with.
As a result, rumors that have no business making it into print get into print on a regular basis. And the Times is worse on this score than anyone. Hell, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times was one of the only mainstream reporters to so much as touch the obviously bullshit Drudge story about Kerry's alleged Mistress in Africa ("Clark Comes Aboard Kerry Campaign," Feb. 14), running Kerry's irritated denial of a "charge posted... on the Web site of internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge." That's the Times in a nutshell: snootily making sure readers don't forget that Drudge is a mere "gossip columnist," then relaying Drudge's gossip themselves.
Bumiller has done the same thing with her Oct. 18 piece, "Talk of Bubble Leads to Battle Over Bulge." This is the Times devoting 805 words to the internet rumors about Bush allegedly having worn a transmitter during the debates that would allow him to receive cues from advisors. The story is remarkable because it is probably the first instance of a reporter having the balls to justify the publication of a factually dicey article on the grounds of its being a literary trope. Harold Bloom would be proud:
"The bulge-the strange rectangular box visible between the president's shoulder blades in the first debate-has set off so much frenzied speculation on the Internet that it has become what literary critics call an objective correlative, or an object that evokes large emotions and ideas."
Bumiller doesn't do any reporting in the piece; she just gets denials from a few Bush spokesmen and a pair of gloating quotes from Terry McAuliffe.
Is the Bulge story newsworthy? Sure-if it's true. If it's true, it's a terrific story. But that used to be the reporter's job, to make that determination. It used to be that the difference between a reporter and some half-wit with a can of spray paint was that the reporter had to either prove a thing or leave it alone. Not anymore. This is not your daddy's New York Times.
Mr. Bush skirted the rock-hard positions favored by his base to plant his flag deep in the mushy middle ground once held by President Bill Clinton.
Look at how much better that works if you write it this way:
Mr. Bush planted his rock-hard throbbing man-shaft up to the base, deep in the mushy middle ground under the skirt once held by President Clinton.
That is a completely different story, and probably a better one.
It seemed right that for this debate on domestic affairs, the two men met in an arena, the Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium at Arizona State University, that was itself based on an unrealized vision for Iraq. Frank Lloyd Wright based the hall on his design for an opera house in Baghdad that was never built.
Bennet used the word "right" instead of "fitting" in that first sentence to deflect attention from the fact that he'd written almost exactly the same passage two weeks before. Wimblehack fans may recall Bennet's first post-debate analysis, which contained this rhapsody to the emerald grass of the University of Miami:
It seemed fitting that this clash of contrasts took place on the campus of the University of Miami, where sun-toasted students in bikinis and flip-flops strolled today across emerald grass past police barricades and scanning machines.
Apparently this is one of Bennet's pet tricks for eating up 50 or 60 words with modifiers and historical data. In fact, if you go back and look, you'll find this same construction in dead spots in Bennet's work from time to time. Take this passage from a piece last year about Bush's visit to Jordan ("Looking Beyond Words," June 5, 2003):
It seemed fitting that these men took this leadership challenge upon themselves in Aqaba, which translates as "obstacle." They met down the beach from the ruins of a fort captured in 1917 by Lawrence of Arabia during a previous attempt to reshape the Middle East.
I sympathize with Bennet-it's hard for an intelligent person to come up with anything at all to say about the debates, and having to do it over and over again in the New York Times can't be easy-but he has to advance, because his sufferings are just too funny for the rest of us. That, and the fact that Gorm Voelver, that sneaky Danish bastard, went more than a week without filing. Voelver's last campaign piece, the Oct. 7 "Cheney Er En Overlever," was a little trite in parts-particularly the line about "passe sit job paa grund af hjerteproblemer." But it was a week too late, and anyway, he's no Bennet. He drops out; Bennet in the Final Four. o