Word: pack
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...these pressures that limit the campaign press in The Boys on the Bus. The correspondents are bound to each other in a pack by the fear that they will miss something, and as tightly fettered to their editors by the order to produce the right news. Timothy Crouse '68, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, travelled with the pack in 1972, and his book is full of images of weary journalists, their blood and sanity drained by hectic cross-country pursuit. Some of the fatigued assimilated the standard speeches of the candidate to spill them on command, or idled hours...
...Crouse knows how to be arch. While his writing is slick, sophisticated, and catchy, he retains a gravity in due respect to the political importance of the press. Entertaining as the style is, however, he's presenting a serious critique. What emerges most strongly are the hazards of pack journalism. The reporters have achieved a peculiar fraternity of chummy fellow travellers who, at a moment's notice, will forsake each other for a scoop...
Crouse implies that this obsession with duplicating the standard only enforces a level of mediocrity. In fact, it is the pariahs of pack journalism who can most easily surface with original and effective work. In what Crouse characterizes as a "male chauvinist profession," women can't pierce the camaraderie of the pack and enjoy a mobility the regular pack cruisers do not have...
Perhaps it was no coincidence that it was a woman who went for Nixon's jugular. Mackin was an outsider. She had neither the opportunity nor the desire to travel with the all-male pack; therefore, she was not infected with the pack's chronic defensiveness and defeatism...she could still call a spade a spade...
PERHAPS THE MOST ODIOUS effect of pack journalism, though, is the "winner's bus" attitude. Like bees to honey, journalists flock to a winner; it is both glamorous and exciting to herald the victor's progress. Crouse suggests that this feeling unconsciously prompts reporters to fashion their subject into a winner, to write stories that too exuberantly predict his success. Sometimes they are left in the lurch, like the disillusioned reporters who roseately optimized Muskie's rortune but suddenly discovered that the bus had run aground without warning...