We Are All on the Bus

A single usage of “star-studded” was simply not enough to portray the majesty of a Kamala Harris campaign event with Oprah Winfrey, according to a Sept. 20 article in The Washington Post. “A star-studded online rally designed to showcase the enthusiasm and energy behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign turned somber as host Oprah Winfrey introduced the mother of a woman who died after waiting for health care in a state that has banned most abortions,” the report began. Several paragraphs later, readers learned that the event kicked off with “a star-studded opening as Winfrey called out other celebrities who were joining virtually—Jennifer Lopez, Bryan Cranston, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Meryl Streep among them.” The average age of the aforementioned stars is 64, once Oprah is factored in.

After leaving the undignifying grind of daily television way back in 2011, Oprah has remained at the rarefied upper summit of senior cultural figures, where she continues to embody national conscience and moral authority. She is the Eleos of the American Olympus, dispenser of compassion and mercy at the steep price of a full and honest public reckoning. Tim Walz, who has repeatedly stretched the truth about his military career and his travels in China, would have been an awesome Oprah guest. The same goes for Walz’s boss, who during her four months as a presidential candidate has carefully evaded any hazardous unscripted moments with the press. In the midst of their breathless coverage of a fake Oprah interview, The Washington Post writers—the article somehow carries the credits of two reporters—were too awestruck or subservient to note its obvious fakeness.

Would it really make that much of a difference if the paper took some other, less fawning approach, or showed even the slightest bit of skepticism about an overly stage-managed Democrat’s internet pageant of Clinton-era celebrities? In The Boys on the Bus, the classic 1972 study of that year’s campaign press, Rolling Stone writer Tim Crouse recounted the media’s powerlessness, and its interrelated lack of self-awareness and basic curiosity, in the face of a Nixon-level image-making operation. Today The Boys on the Bus is often remembered as a nostalgic chronicle of the fading glory days of American journalism. But it is really about the political media’s discovery that it might not really matter that much—that it isn’t a mighty tribune of democratic accountability, but a submissive player in someone else’s drama.

“Nixon’s advisors had the revolutionary idea that they could run their candidate from the safety of a television studio, thereby eliminating the meddlesome press,” Crouse wrote. The incumbent, who would go on to win 49 states and 60% of the vote, correctly realized that Americans “would believe the version of Nixon that they saw on TV, rather than the version the reporters presented, secondhand, in the newspaper.” The president blazed a new trail for national candidates by holding infrequent press conferences and interviews during the 1972 race and barring the media from many of his campaign events. Journalists completely ignored the interesting things they did get to see, like Nixon supporters beating up anti-war activists at a rally in Long Island. Once Nixon “discovered … he could use television to get around the press,” he barely seemed to campaign at all. Crouse wrote, “Nixon fed the reporters a phony campaign, and many of the reporters ate it up.”

Many, but not all. The Washington Post’s David Broder, perpetually concerned over the ever-eroding status of consensus institutions in America, “sensed that Nixon was trying to kill off that most sacred of institutions, the Presidential election,” wrote Crouse. “The president campaigns as a candidate, not a touring emperor,” Broder wrote wishfully (and incorrectly) during the stretch-run of the 1972 race. Only a small minority of hacks joined this quasi-resistance. Crouse recounted how the White House press corps delighted in Des Moines Register reporter Clark Mollenhoff’s embarrassment at the hands of press secretary Ron Ziegler—in a tense media briefing, the journalists sided with the arch-Nixonian former public relations executive when he told a series of obvious lies about Mollenhoff allegedly having mangled Ziegler’s admission that the campaign financed the Watergate burglary.

Today’s journalists continue to believe it’s part of their job to aid in especially brilliant-seeming strategies of media evasion. When Harris at last sat for a series of easygoing conversations with podcasters and personalities who openly supported her candidacy, The New York Times’ television critic congratulated the vice president for her “whirlwind tour of talk shows and interviews,” which “revealed the kind of persona she wants to present as she seeks to become the election’s main character.” When Harris finally sat down with 60 Minutes in early October, the country’s leading television news-magazine helpfully shuffled around answers and questions to create a false appearance of coherency.

Crouse sensed the media industry’s gluttony for its own humiliation and its strong professional instinct toward toadying to the powerful, qualities so deeply ingrained that they could manifest without conscious intention. “He didn’t look like a man bent on distorting reality,” wrote Crouse of an NBC producer who exaggerates an obviously “stage-managed” floor demonstration at the Democratic convention in Miami into a “balloon extravaganza” for the viewers at home, loaded with “shouting and flashing images.” Even the best of the reporters Crouse covered weren’t mentally or morally strong enough to resist the basic conditions of the job. “In the world of straight, ‘objective’ journalism, the more freedom you gave a reporter, the more he censored himself,” Crouse concluded, with even the above-average reporters stalked by fears of straying from the pack, getting something wrong, or being banished to the “Zoo plane” with the rest of the B-listers and undesirables. “Freedom scared a reporter out of his mind,” wrote Crouse. The entire media constantly sleepwalked into obedience—which meant the media would eventually have no choice but to make obedience a professional virtue.

The Boys on the Bus is a damning psychological profile of the American journalistic profession, whose mentality is revealed to have remained appallingly stable over the past five decades. Crouse identified the insecurities that make journalists so seamlessly manipulable. The “feverish atmosphere” of hacks swarming George McGovern’s primary campaign “was somewhere between a high school bus trip to Washington and a gambler’s jet junket to Las Vegas, where small-time mafiosi were lured into betting away their restaurants.” By the end of the campaign, the reporters tailing McGovern “had a very limited usefulness as political observers … for what they knew best was not the American electorate but the tiny community of the press plane, a totally abnormal world that combined the incestuousness of a New England hamlet with the giddiness of a mid-ocean gala and the physical rigors of the Long March.”

The media organizations Crouse observed were blighted with self-regard, with the television networks in particular viewing themselves “as omnipotent and sacred institutions, like the presidency.” For journalists, proximity to the presidential campaign, or a feeling of participation in it, became an unhealthy source of professional and even personal meaning. Crouse made a series of blood-curdling observations about one Baltimore Sun writer: “He bitched incessantly about everything—the food, the accommodations, the staff, the press operation, and the campaign in general—but he obviously reveled in all the rituals of the campaign … more than anyone else in the press corps, he seemed to derive his whole identity from being a campaign reporter. He seemed to love the dozens of ways in which the campaign made the press feel important; they had special phones set up for them at every stop, they had entree to backstage areas, they were men apart.”

Journalists have always been an insecure bunch, for reasons so freakishly consistent across time that they can only be endemic to the profession. Since the dawn of the modern national media, journalists have suspected they are trivial people engaged in an activity whose essential pettiness, and even its unseemliness, must be hidden from the public at all costs. As Crouse recounted, the political scientist Leo Rosten had already figured out the Washington press’s inferiority complexes way back in the mid-1930s. Political journalists have long suspected they are mediocrities huddled at the feet of people of actual genius and action. In order to make their jobs palatable to themselves and justifiable to the wider society, the hacks have needed to make the chasmic distances between themselves and their subjects appear as small as they can get away with.

The journalist’s fear that they are in fact a kind of glorified interloper within the vastness of history makes them pitifully easy for politicians to capture. Ever on the lookout for shortcuts to professional aggrandizement, journalists are impressed with spectacles and pseudo-events that are thrown specifically for them. Often they have no awareness that this is happening. In one of countless episodes in The Boys on the Bus that encapsulates the effortless victory of public relations over journalism, the media covering the Republican National Convention is shocked to discover that the entire thing is scripted, right down to the standing ovations. Republican communications staffers mistakenly delivered copies of the script to various media organizations covering the convention, and a panicked RNC aide even attempted to physically rip the document out of the hands of a BBC journalist. The controversy had no discernible effect on the election.

Today, it seems absurd that any journalist was surprised at the script’s existence, or that they could possibly believe they were attending an event where anything spontaneous or unpredictable would be allowed to happen. But back then, Crouse wrote, members of the White House press corps often “forgot they were handout artists and convinced themselves they were somehow associates of a man who was shaping epochal events.” The Boys on the Bus teems with examples of politicians telling journalists how important they are as a method of neutralizing them. The Kennedy administration “made the reporters feel like part of the staff, like cherished advisors or bosom friends.”

These kinds of delusions endure, and it has long been obvious that journalists are the witting and unwitting mouthpieces of sophisticated messaging operations. Crouse fell for one such maneuver, and had the rare integrity and presence of mind to share it in detail. At the Democratic convention, Crouse agreed to help a political strategist friend of his relay a scoop to an anchor for NBC News stationed on the convention floor: Ted Kennedy was going to appear on television to deliver a statement from Massachusetts at 11 p.m.; California Sen. John Tunney, a client of Crouse’s friend, was close with Kennedy, and could appear on NBC to preview his announcement. Every element of this was nonsense. In reality, a group of “bored reporters” had invited Kennedy’s press secretary for a late dinner at a Hyannisport fish house, which someone misreported as being a press conference by Kennedy himself. It’s entirely possible some of these misrepresentations were deliberate, and that Crouse’s friend lied to him in an inevitably futile attempt to get his man on prime-time TV.

Years later, journalists would become errand-runners for foreign intelligence agents, partisan strategists, terrorist groups and conspiracy theorists. Errand-running is one of the most respected journalistic practices of our time—The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election, a notion that originated with a DNC-funded dossier written by a former British spy who got much of his information from people who themselves turned out to be Russian regime operatives, people who often found that lie-peddling to Anglophone political creatures made for an easy and lucrative career. In October of 2023, the Times was one of the first publications to break the Hamas-controlled health ministry’s claims of the Israeli destruction of Gaza’s al-Ahli Hospital and the deaths of the hundreds of civilians sheltering inside. In fact a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket had hit the hospital’s parking lot, killing perhaps a couple dozen people and leaving the building intact. Errand-running had become a journalistic folkway by then: If important-enough terrorists claimed something, it became news automatically, even at The New York Times. Luckily Americans now know better than to automatically believe much of anything from the press. Earlier this month, Gallup reported all-time lows in public confidence in the media, with 69% of respondents having low trust or no trust in what they see and read.

In Crouse’s day, it was at least possible to think of the press as a genuinely independent entity. Newspapers were still fundamental to the civic identity of places large and small—Crouse mentioned that Newsday arrived in seven of 10 Long Island driveways every morning in 1972. The industry was confident enough in itself to tolerate oddballs and dissenters along with pathological liars and assorted weirdos. Times political star R.W. Apple made ludicrous claims about killing Viet Cong militants while on assignment; Robert Novak comes off as a fascinatingly tortured character, personally opposed to “anything good-looking, anything fashionable, anything slick.”

But Crouse sensed the ultimately pathetic and compromised nature of everything and everyone around him, a rot that extended to people he genuinely liked. One of the more striking sections of the book is Crouse’s treatment of his Rolling Stone colleague Hunter S. Thompson. Today Thompson is thought of as the ultimate journalistic rebel, an icon of total integrity and a renegade too courageous and too cool for his stupid, oily professional peers. Crouse peered a little closer, and saw that Thompson was just a different species of conformist.

Crouse reported that Thompson’s immortal verdict that Nixon’s impending reelection proved “we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable” was much admired among the 1972 campaign journalists, who wished they could also have been so honest. “But they were also keenly aware that you could not sway millions of Middle Americans by sneering at used car dealers,” Crouse wrote. There was apparently a time when the media experienced real inner conflict over the perceived concerns of middle America. Thompson, openly scornful of the majority of his fellow citizens, “could say what he liked because he was talking to his own people … and who was Thompson speaking to? A Chicano welfare lawyer, or perhaps a very hip college student.”

An incipient elitist, Thompson was telling the future liberal-managerial coalition exactly what it wanted to hear, and he channeled—and in some sense helped invent—the beliefs and sensibilities of the rising generation of squares. By the time of his 2005 suicide, Thompson had drunk himself into irrelevance and become one of a million sources of rote anti-Bush screeds. Of course Bush was a deserving target, and most writers, including some very good ones, will never have a 10-minute run of originality, never mind the 10-year one Thompson had. Still, in 1972, somewhere near the height of that run, a sharp 25-year-old could sense that even someone as liberated as Thompson was never as free as he appeared, or as free as he thought he was.

Politics is one of the great American growth industries, with nearly $16 billion in projected spending on federal races alone in 2024 and over $100 million in small donations going to the two major party presidential candidates. If Americans really despised the hyperpoliticized state of our culture, we wouldn’t fund it out of pocket. We wouldn’t constantly make celebrities out of politicians and politicians out of celebrities. In such a utopia, one where tens of millions of people no longer needed politics for entertainment and a sense of self-worth, political podcasts would exist only for the obsessed and the unwell, Tucker Carlson would not be able to sell out an arena tour, and the Taylor Swifts of the world would realize that they can only demean and diminish themselves through endorsing any politician for any reason. That utopia is far away though. We have chosen a different way to live.

What makes the journalists of The Boys on the Bus such recognizable American characters, and the thing that links their outlook with the obsessions of the present era, is that they reflect the schismatic American attitude toward power. Power both repulsed and titillated them, as it repulses and titillates us. Power is gross, the domain of Richard Nixon-like gargoyles and the total antithesis of the Hunter S. Thompson ethos. Yet the Puritan association of power with virtue remains impossible to fully break, and it demands obeisance toward the alternatively hopeful and oppressive moralism of which Oprah and perhaps even Kamala Harris are inheritors. Meanwhile Donald Trump embodies the more atavistic American power ideal, promising retribution on behalf of the nation’s scorned and now quasi-militarized used car dealers.

The truly damaged—and there are a lot of us—consider it a privilege merely to witness these grotesque rituals of American power, and we hope to aid in their final completion every fourth November. “It would be a good while before any of them would again discover the same irresistible combination of camaraderie, hardship, and luxury,” Crouse wrote as he watched the McGovern press corps scatter to their home newsrooms the week after election day. “They now had to go back to paying the dues which would earn them another campaign in 1976.”

Much of the country now shares their mentality. Even as votes are cast, the sickest and truest parts of ourselves can’t wait to run it all back again.