Mingle Until Departure

At the time of "The Boys on the Bus," that kind of reporting hadn't been done before: Nobody was worried about what Crouse was going to write, so they had their guard down. The modern press corps is a lot of company men, and I think back then there were more, well, unwieldy individuals. You would never have had a phenomenon like McGovern's Zoo Plane on today's campaign -- that's what they called the plane they put the press on. Legendary wild parties went on in there, drugs, sex acts. I would doubt that so much as one sex act occurred during the entire Kerry campaign.

Not even a hand job?

Well, maybe a hand job. I don't know. It certainly wasn't a fun gig.
...
There used to be different kinds of people who were journalists. There were real cynics, there were drunks, there were hardened smokers, and now there's this glamour and glow that goes along with being a part of the press corps. I guess what I'm trying to do is take away some of that glow and make it clear it's not quite as cool as they make it out to be. I don't know if that has an effect or not, but that's sort of the strategy.

Having driven those whiny hacks around much of Iowa, I can back him up on that. Not fun people, mostly.

perma-linky posted by jkd : 11:31