Vanity Fair: "There Really Is Only One Story Right Now": Campaign Reporters Are Stuck in Limbo...

[George II]

“There Really Is Only One Story Right Now”: Campaign Reporters Are Stuck in Limbo as the 2020 Race Gets Drowned Out

With America under quarantine, the boys—and girls—are off the bus. They’re now watching Joe Biden beam into CNN from his Wilmington rec room and fundraise via Zoom. Will the press corps be staring at screens through November?

BY TOM KLUDT MARCH 25, 2020

In any other election season, Ken Thomas might’ve spent this past weekend in Georgia, trailing the Democratic frontrunner as he barnstormed across the state. “It’s not hard to imagine that we would be with Joe Biden in a church in Atlanta,” Thomas told me on Sunday, two days before the Peach State was slated to hold its now postponed primary. Or Thomas, who covers the presidential race for the Wall Street Journal, might’ve been in California, where sources told him that Biden was planning a fundraiser at the end of the month. Such is the fluidity that defines a campaign reporter’s existence, a life pockmarked by scrambled itineraries and last-minute flight bookings.

But one place Thomas didn’t expect to be covering a Biden fundraiser in late March was from his Washington, D.C. home. After enjoying the warm spring weather with his children on his patio, Thomas ventured inside to fulfill his duties as Biden “pool reporter,” a rotating assignment in which one journalist covers a campaign event for the broader press corps, usually because of space constraints in, say, a hotel ballroom or donor’s home. Under normal circumstances, Thomas would have scanned the room to identify notable attendees; for Friday’s “virtual fundraiser,” held on the Zoom video conference app, he studied the list of participants, which included Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski. And because a pool report isn’t complete without a little color, Thomas made sure to note that the “sound of a barking dog occasionally could be heard in the background” while Biden addressed donors over the livestream. “What makes covering the race so much more difficult now is that your vantage point is only what can fit on your screen,” Thomas said.

Such is the rigidity that now defines the life of a reporter on the 2020 beat, left to cover a campaign that feels as if it is in suspended animation. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust much of the country into isolation, and upended the professional lives of millions. There really is no one for whom the era of social distancing has been a normal experience, but the abrupt shift has been particularly jarring to see unfold within the context of this year’s presidential race—both for the candidates and the journalists assigned to cover them. Traditional campaign events have, at least for the time being, been replaced by livestreamed remarks beamed out of the candidates’ homes. “The campaign trail now runs through Joe Biden’s living room,” said Politico’s Marc Caputo. “That’s where this campaign is being waged now.”

One recurring lamentation after the 2016 election was that the political media, largely based on the coasts, had missed the Donald Trump phenomenon because they were disconnected from the rest of America, perhaps too tethered to Twitter or reliant on Republican and Democratic establishment sources who didn’t see an insurgency coming. And that critique has been lobbed even after journalists racked hotel points crisscrossing the country with Trump and Hillary Clinton, getting a ground-level perspective that, for the immediate future, is obscured.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/campaign-reporters-are-stuck-in-limbo-as-the-2020-race-gets-drowned-out