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    the point of view of young people..., 2005-04-15 12:53:52 | Main | insurgency claims another aid worker..., 2005-04-17 13:29:35

    reject it:

    For over thirty years now, since the publication of such books as “The Selling of the President”, “The Boys on the Bus”, and “Fear and Loathing”, it had been accepted as a given that the press itself plays an enormously important role in the process. Even if you wanted to argue, as I did, that the behavior of the press during the campaign was the dominant factor in guaranteeing that only certain kinds of ideologically acceptable candidates could appear in the general election, such a story would shock no one, because it's already "out there," as a "thing." More than a dozen times on the Kerry plane, I had reporters ask me: "So, you're doing a Boys on the Bus thing, right?" The original Boys on the Bus raised a few eyebrows, sure, but no one anywhere is threatened by a "Boys on the Bus thing" now.

    I was having a tough time in particular because I now found myself working for a magazine that was spending thousands of dollars a day for me to watch this whole business unfold, and the only original conclusion that I could reach was that participating in the campaign at all was counterproductive, and that the only way to really express the horror of it in a proper way was to reject it openly and entirely, that is, to not be there.

    The story, it seemed fairly clear to me, was everywhere but the plane --in the neighborhoods that the campaigns never visited, in the issues that were never discussed on the air, in the minds of the millions of people who were too sickened by it all to vote and who never visited the rallies.

    But the campaign scrupulously avoided any physical proximity to those people, those places, those issues. And even if I wanted to confront one of the candidates about it, I had to do so shouting over a dozen other reporters who had other things on their minds.


:: posted by buermann @ 2005-04-15 13:16:26 CST | link





    go ahead, express that vague notion
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