The Web and the presidential race -- not just a lesson in technology

Bill Boyarsky has done his share of political reporting. He’s covered presidential campaigns since 1968, when Nixon was first elected to the White House, and worked for The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times.

So I was a bit surprised when the 73-year-old, who now writes for the liberal political blog Truthdig, admitted that his current gig has, this late in his career, boosted his confidence.

No longer working for an organization that has the money to finance travels with the press pack on the campaign buses and planes, Boyarsky has had to figure things out for himself.

“Being alone, I had to think all the time,” he said of his experiences following candidates around the country to find stories to write for Truthdig.

An interesting way to put it, I think, considering stereotypes of an echoing press pack traveling with somewhat of a mob mentality.

Technology has undoubtedly changed both how people are following the campaign and how reporters are covering it, but not necessarily for the better, Boyarsky noted. The urgency of the Internet has pressed the press to value speed over good judgment.

“I’ve never seen so many wrong calls as there are today,” Boyarsky said. “And I’ve never seen journalists with such need to make these calls.”

The days of the “boys on the bus” are over; no longer are reporters drinking and laughing together after they finish their stories of the day. Now there is pressure to keep working, with reporters lacking human contact with each other when they are instead absorbed in their BlackBerrys – emailing sources and editors, and getting instant access to the work of their competitors. And perhaps this reading alone has become a new form of the media’s echo chamber.

But technology has also allowed sites like Truthdig to flourish – often offering perspectives from people who are covering the race “alone.”

All the hard work and obsession on the Internet by reporters working for major outlets has inspired seemingly has done little to lend originality or credibility to this election cycle’s coverage. The media were given a blanket criticism for getting it wrong on John McCain over the summer, and for getting it wrong on Hillary Clinton and New Hampshire, to name a couple prominent examples. And many call the post-mortems on Clinton’s campaign before the March 4 primaries in Ohio and Texas premature.

But even after her wins those all-important states, a strain of similar stories is still appearing, mostly by those who seem to have more freedom in what they are covering. And so, now, some press accounts are avoiding the echo – stories can’t seem to agree on how seriously to take Clinton’s race against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination.

What are mostly more conventional daily stories seem to take her extremely seriously, portraying the horse race between her and Obama as one where he is only a few paces, instead of a few laps, ahead.

And then there are the stories that take pains to point out what the authors see as a cold, hard fact: mathematically, Clinton has little chance to catch up with Obama, barring any history-changing (and outrage-provoking) overturn of the popular and/or delegate vote by the superdelegates.

So which storyline should we, the audience, pay attention to? It seems strange to have a choice about the state of a candidate’s campaign after hearing so much of the same lines from all the press so far in this race.

Although an anti-conventional-wisdom aspect of the press has always existed, technology, for the damage it may have done to the mainstream coverage of this year’s presidential election, has been an overall benefit to voters wanting to find out about the candidates.

The pack may be filing more stories more quickly and more carelessly, but these reporters are still charged with telling people what the candidates and their staffs are saying every day. But, because of the expansion of people like Boyarsky influencing the rhetoric, there is now much more to coverage than just that.

More reporters, who don’t have daily assignments on people they spend nearly all their time with and have possibly covered for years, have access to a medium that can spread their takes on the election far and wide.

Despite Boyarsky’s claim that technology has hindered the media’s judgment, he himself is an example of where technology has allowed reporting to shine.

If this veteran reporter’s being alone has caused him to learn and to think, then it should do the same for us.