From a New York Times story by Michael M. Grynbaum headlined “Covering Campaigns From the Couch, Not the Trail:
The deck of the story: The boys (and girls) aren’t on the bus. That means no face-to-face interviews with swing-state voters, no hotel-bar meetings with political operatives and reports with less texture.
There is no more campaign trail. Instead of a traveling circus of raucous rallies, press bus gossip and drinks with sources at the hotel bar, there is Joseph R. Biden Jr. in his Delaware basement, videoconferencing into cable news. Journalists, barred from flying for safety reasons, still report by phone and text message, but voters go uninterviewed and swing states unexplored. . . .
In interviews, nearly a dozen now-grounded campaign reporters described feeling unmoored without the usual rhythm of journeying from state to state, jousting with aides and badgering candidates — the raw ingredients that, through a subtle alchemy of social media, cable news hits and print deadlines, forge the day-to-day story line of a presidential race.
“That socializing that happens among the beat reporters that travel with the candidate all the time, and have that weird bond and relationship with the campaign and with each other — out of that petri dish, campaign narratives form,” Ryan Lizza, Politico’s chief Washington correspondent, said in an interview (conducted over FaceTime, naturally). “That dynamic isn’t there anymore. You don’t have that window into the campaign.”. . .
After 2016, when Donald J. Trump’s victory caught many prominent journalists by surprise (and led to remonstrations from readers and viewers), senior leaders in the news business pledged not to repeat the same mistakes. In 2020, went the refrain, political writers would focus on the heartland, leaving behind the conventional-wisdom factories of newsrooms in Washington and New York.
Man plans, and God laughs. Amid the pandemic, much of the country’s political press is now marooned in those coastal cities, covering a national race from couches in Georgetown and Brooklyn. . . .
One remedy Peter Hamby proposed: Cable networks should dump a few highly compensated pundits and hire correspondents who reside beyond the coastal bubbles. “The amount some of these networks are paying their contributors could fund dozens of correspondents around the country,” he said. . . .
For now, some stranded trail watchers are finding new ways to occupy their time. Mark McKinnon, a co-host of the Showtime political series “The Circus,” has moved from New York to Colorado, where he is focusing on a different presidential campaign: the fictional one in a screenplay he is writing with his daughter.
“That’s what we do when there’s no real race to cover,” Mr. McKinnon said. “We make one up.”
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