Money for Nothing...

and the Chicks for Free?

Dana Milbank spills the beans on how little our "campaign media" really does out there on the trail. I know, I know, it's supposed to be a "humor" piece.

But what he's missing is how his honesty comes across. (psst. Dana? We really don't need you fellas out there anymore. We've got other, better sources of info now, and since so many of you aren't really reporting, just carrying water for this meme or that, why not hang up your notepads and get a real reporting job?)

I’ve long suspected that if editors knew how little journalism occurs on the campaign trail, they would never pay our expenses

Forget door-knocking. In reality, it’s more trainspotting. Reporters hang out at candidate appearances — and restaurants — talking primarily among themselves and comparing notes on which canned events they attended. (Did you see Santorum in Salem? No, I went to Romney in Hudson so I could catch Newt in Nashua.)
...
This year turned out to be a particularly wasteful one in the Granite State. Once Romney won in Iowa, the question was not whether he would win here but by how much. Yet the reporters descended anyway: Our hotel rooms were nonrefundable.

The good residents of New Hampshire, uninspired by the candidates, seemed less interested in attending candidate rallies than in years past. The result was that traveling mobs of journalists routinely outnumbered the “real people.”

As Jon Huntsman wound down his New Hampshire campaign with a stop Monday at Crosby Bakery in Nashua, he was trailed by about 150 journalists. Total number of New Hampshire voters: Perhaps a dozen. And some of them seemed more focused on taking pictures of “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory than in seeing the candidate.

As I played sherpa for my editor, it was hard to conceal the fact that I was leading her on a journalistic road to nowhere.
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Next day, we headed to a Gingrich appearance that had great metaphorical promise: He reached out to Manchester’s Hispanic community by holding an event at Don Quijote’s Mexican and Caribbean restaurant. But it turned out to be more stagecraft for the media mob.

The campaign handed out “Newt Con Nosotros” buttons and had a local man with a Spanish accent introduce the candidate. A Gingrich daughter attempted what sounded like first-year Spanish on the crowd. But her proficiency didn’t matter, because two rooms in the restaurant, and a good part of a third, were crammed with journalists.

“All I see are white faces,” complained one news photographer.
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Later, my editor and I retreated to Jackie’s Diner in Nashua, around the corner from the Huntsman event. Waitress Barbara Justason, 77, told us she had tired of the campaign events. “It’s all reporters and no real people,” she said.

The “real people” just weren’t into the campaign this year. “Usually I research everything and have big arguments at the counter. This time, I found myself not even wanting to read the articles in the paper,” she said. “Maybe I’ll close my eyes and it’ll be eenie, meenie, mynie, moe.”

That’s just what we were afraid to tell our editors: The New Hampshire primary just wasn’t much of a story.

Your work is what you make of it, Dana.

Maybe you need to hire some hungry questioners. Some people who live and work in the real world, and who are actually affected by these political policies. It seems funny now, and you got another column out of it, but in the end I suspect, the joke's on the 21-Century "journolists".

We don't really need you much anymore...
That's all.