The Boys on the Bus is the story of the eclipse of American journalism’s civic purpose | Tablet Magazine

 

We Are All on the Bus

Timothy Crouse’s brilliant book about the servile self-importance of political reporters, ‘The Boys on the Bus,’ describes a disease that now infects the entire country

by Armin Rosen
October 21, 2024

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. . .

The Boys on the Bus is the story of the eclipse of American journalism’s civic purpose, something that even happened within the minds of the journalists themselves. 

• The political class’s mastery of the media and its tribal neuroses could only be revealed, or even perceived, by someone socialized outside the tribe, in this case a 25-year-old former Peace Corps volunteer and alternative press correspondent with no real ambition to join the journalistic establishment. 
• Crouse’s book secured him a still-durable place in American political-literary history. 
• But his one other major work of note is a revival of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes, which is about as far away as one can get from the industry whose problems he so witheringly diagnosed.

Anything Goes - Cole Porter (with lyrics)

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 amalgam of the PR industry, political spin-doctoring, and mass neurosis that Crouse described could hardly be contained. 

In the 52 years since his book appeared, the hacks have marched out of the pages of their newspapers and magazines, most of which are dead or irrelevant by now, and colonized the normie world. 

A modern-day reader of The Boys on the Bus greets passages like these with queasy self-recognition: 

The campaign journalists “began to realize how much they liked the way of life, the womblike protection of the plane … They were tired, cross, and so overworked that they could not stand another second of the campaign, and yet they wanted it to go on forever.” 

That’s all of us now, obsessed with a permanent election that everyone hates.

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 hyper-politicized 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. . .
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.


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. . .

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. I
• n 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. 
• 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.”