The Daily Egyptian is published by the students of SIU at Carbondale. Except during vacations and exam weeks, The Daily Egyptian is published Monday through Friday during the fall and spring semesters and TWThF during the summer semester."

The media mosh pit

ST. LOUIS - The hour hand crept past 10 p.m., and for CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, the second presidential debate was over. Never mind that, technically, it was over half an hour ago. In his business, politics run on a different clock.

After 30 minutes of polls and analysis, conversations with countless pundits and talking heads about what the debate really meant to America, Blitzer could finally take a break. He sipped on some generic bottled water and watched the crew begin the arduous task of taking down the set that has dominated Washington University's quad for two days.

This debate was over.

One question from the audience, however, remained to be answered.

"Wolf!" shouted one Washington University student in the now-dispersing audience. "Who won the debate?"

Blitzer looked out at the crowd and smiled. He let loose a chuckle.

"I won the debate!" he says.

When all is said and done, there even may be some truth to it. After all, CNN is a powerhouse. Canvassing the globe with more than 4,000 correspondents, it's the most-watched cable news channel around. Therefore, Wolf carries some weight. People listen to him, and what he says matters. If he were the only voice speaking, everyone would absorb his each and every word.

As it happens, though, that scenario is far from reality.

More than 1,500 journalists attended Friday's debate. That's a lot of voices, and with all of them scrambling across a tightly-monitored campus, trying to glean any news from any crevice they could find, Washington University resembled a bloated press conference. For all the journalists working all the hours, however, there are even more this year who will greet their work with skepticism or even cynicism.

There can only be one truth, they will say. There can only be one story. Amazingly, none of those 1,500 will latch onto it at the end of the day.

For Washington University freshman Ben Kay, it was all a matter of what they will latch onto. Holding vigil Friday at the CNN stage, Kay had been asked a lot of different questions from a lot of different media.

In fact, the DAILY EGYPTIAN was his third interview of the afternoon, and by that point, he was running out of things to say. As a result, he posed me a question: "Isn't there a debate going on today?"

Are we not preparing to elect the next leader of the free world? Why, with all these momentous events going on, are people asking him questions?

I shrugged and told him the truth: I don't know. That's a very good question.

He smiled and latched back onto his John Kerry sign.

"It's sad that my concept of holding this sign is news," he said smugly. "But that's they way things are."

The Daily Egyptian was one of the only college newspapers in the country granted access to Friday's presidential debate in St. Louis. As it happens, this was mostly a bookkeeping error.

College newspapers were, as a rule, not allowed press credentials; a representative from the Commission on Presidential Debates said there simply was not enough room. However, they made a mistake in issuing us credentials. They admitted it. Either way, we were in.

As it turns out, though, getting in doesn't necessarily get you into anything. Once on campus, we found that despite the nifty badges we were wearing, doors didn't really open. Even those that were open were guarded by a legion of Secret Service agents.

We were left to the same task that almost every other journalist on campus was relegated to: write a slick little story on the Washington University students and head over to the media filing center.

This place, guarded by another swarm of agents and complete with a metal detector checkpoint, was set in a harrowingly sterile gymnasium in the basement of the debate hall. Its contents, aside from a fleet of closed-circuit televisions and connection wires for laptop computers, consisted mostly of bored journalists swapping stories and drinking beer brought in from the hospitality tent at the end of the hall.

When the debate started, the tedium didn't end.

Of course, there was work going on, a steady orchestra of the tapping of computer keys serving as a reminder that journalists were at work. Some, though, were left with nothing to do. Minutes after the debate began, Anderson Cooper, host of CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360°," entered and sat down on the floor about 10 feet in front of us.

All in all, his job appeared to consist of tinkering with his cell phone, casually sipping on a Diet Coke and politely signing autographs for ogling reporters who passed by. Mostly, he performed this task with a smile and a silent detachment. He did the same for news photographers who regularly snapped his picture.

There's always a deadline hanging overhead, a not-so-silent pressure to get the news, get it now and get as much as you can. For the print journalists, the heat was on to get a story filed for the next day's paper; television news crews had to set themselves to get as many frames of video as possible.

This, of course, is all standard procedure, but the difference in such a rigidly controlled event is that the journalists have access to nothing. There is no news to see. What they do get to see on the TV monitors is exactly what they could have seen in the comfort of their own living rooms.

But there's still that deadline to contend with. So they take pictures of each other. They take pictures of each other taking pictures of each other. And in the end, this will fill that news hole.

Some experts, though, are leery of that news hole, which grows ever larger with introduction of more cable channels, more newspapers and more Internet blogs. The more media we get, they suggest, the more watered down it becomes.

"There's an insatiable demand for information," said John Jackson, a visiting professor with the SIUC Public Policy Institute. "There's a 24-hour news cycle to fill. The industry in this country is huge. Are we better for it? I don't know. It's in the eye of the beholder."

That eye, however, has to sift through a lot of information before it finds anything to behold. In any recent election year, constant polling on a daily basis leads to what Manjunath Pendakur, dean of the SIUC College of Mass Communications, calls "a boxing match." Elections, he said, are no longer sold with the tag of politics. Today, they're sold as sporting events. Pendakur said it is becoming increasingly difficult to figure out the real truth.

"It's a slice of reality, but it's always full of complications," Pendakur said of the polling process, which is lined with complications from how many people are called to why only people with land-line telephones are called.

"Poll information has news value. The old filters have become transformed to accommodate the voracious appetite 24-hour news channels have. It's self-serving documentation."

It's not just self-serving, said one political analyst. It's also beginning to serve other political interests as well. Marvin Kalb, a political science lecturer at Harvard University, has spent the last 10 years teaching classes about how the news media is becoming increasingly polarized along political lines.

Now, in an ever-changing political climate, news outlets have taken on ever-more political faces, he said. We have Fox News. We have Al Franken, offering up the alternative. We have "Fahrenheit 9/11." Even in Carbondale, we have the DAILY EGYPTIAN, often criticized for its liberal slant, and the Southern Illinoisan, which typically takes a conservative point of view.

This is the stuff of 19th-century yellow journalism, Kalb said, not the stuff of progressive journalism in a new millennium. The American people deserve better, he said.

"It raises a critical question ... of whether that is good for journalism and the country," Kalb said. "People have to have a place for information that is politically untainted. They don't trust any longer what they read in mainstream media. That's the heart and soul of it. The mainstream media has lost its credibility."

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For now, at least as far as Washington University is concerned, the point is moot. The hordes of journalists that invaded the school have all gone home or moved on. Some went back to their workplaces. Some went on with the press corps to cover the candidates further down the trail.

In their wake, they left a university now sitting in relative silence.

"It was very heavy work, and it still is," said Sue McGinn, director of University Communications at the school, talking about the return to normalcy that was still going on Monday afternoon. "I'm still trying to get things put together again."

As the journalists move on down the trail, it's difficult not to wonder at what precisely they accomplished. Observing the process for the first time, it's hard not to see it as merely a media mosh pit.

Everybody was running around. Everybody was fighting for a scoop. Everybody wanted the news. But for all their combined efforts, for all the press passes handed out and the clearances given at the security gates, what did anyone walk away with?

Was it the news? Was it a valuable story? Was it worth the time and effort? Was it just a news hole getting filled?

It's difficult to tell through the cloud of spin. What journalists were given as they sat in the media filing center was an endless trail of press releases. The Bush campaign handed out its word on what was being said. Then the Kerry folks came out with their version. This went on without a break, a constant wall of this tale and that.

Then, at the end, in the tradition known as "Spin Alley," politicians from across the nation entered the room to give their distinctly partisan slants. Members of the press rushed to them. This was the first interesting thing to happen in the room all night.

"It's easier to write about charges and counter-charges than to dig in and offer analysis on the candidates," said Mike Lawrence, director of the SIUC Public Policy Institute. "Some do a good job of covering issues and examining records, and others don't.

"Many journalists have limited resources and time in a given day. They have to make deadline. It would be better if editors, publishers and media outlets provided more of the resources they need."

For students at Washington University, however, life moves on after the debate. There are no more questions from the media to be answered. There are no more security checks on campus. Eric Seelig, who was out Friday to observe all the excitement, said it's difficult to see the event as a debate. It was something more than that. Something manufactured. And although he said it was exciting to see the debate come to campus, it's easy for him to see it for what it truly was.

"It's not a debate," he said. "It's a press conference."

 

 

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