Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I’ve become almost numb to the stories about the end of serious print journalism—the lay-offs, the bureau closings, the disappearance of fact checkers, libraries and integrity. So it was strangely refreshing to read today about one budget cut that may make the world a better place and certainly makes common sense.

News outlets are cutting back on budgets for covering the President! Now, this is portrayed as terrible news by the New York Times, more evidence that the end of the world is near, etc. But I am not so sure.

I have dipped in and out of the Washington news gaggles for 14 years, and I can tell you that having a pack of 30 reporters following the President around in a chartered plane is not good journalism. I’ve never understood it. This is arguably the most expensive kind of reporting after war reporting, and yet it yields very little truly useful information.

And yet that is how it has been done for decades. All sorts of valuable reporting trips get cut before anyone dares mess with the tens of thousands of dollars that get spent every quarter on following (and photographing) the President. And why is this? Why do we need several dozen people running around after the President, writing down largely the same things?

It’s not because the reader needs this level of redundancy, I can tell you that. I have seen these packs, and it is not pretty. Basically, the reporters engage in a desperate and somewhat embarrassing battle to get one tiny shred of new information or “scene,” as it is called, out of a highly choreographed event that is being recorded, analyzed and Tweeted to death by their competitors. I have seen smart, otherwise sane daily beat reporters chase each other across parking lots to ask one more question of Barack Obama in the futile quest to get him to say something newsworthy that he has not already said a thousand times—to get him to make a mistake, in other words. There is rarely any time to talk to the real people who may attend these events.

But big news organizations consider this a prestige beat, one that they must do even after they’ve cut everything else. Witness the bizarre logic in this excerpt from the Times story today:

The skimping on charters started in the tail end of the George W. Bush administration and has deepened during Mr. Obama’s 16 months of office, particularly in the last three months, news executives say. In these cases — be they in Buffalo this month or in Prague, where Mr. Obama traveled last month without a press charter for an important nuclear arms deal — the only reporters who are in the so-called presidential bubble are the dozen in a travel pool that fly on Air Force One and take notes and pictures for the rest of the press corps.

What is wrong with having a dozenreporters shadowing the President? Why isn’t that enough?!

It reminds me of a quote in James Fallows’ thoughtful story on Google in the new Atlantic. He is interviewing Krishna Bharat, a Google executive who is perplexed by the redundancy in all news coverage, not just White House coverage:

“It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” [Bharat] asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.” He said this was not a purely theoretical question. “I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”

I suspect that the tradition of saturation White House coverage has more to do with reporters’ vanity and editors’ lack of imagination than with real news. The real news is happening wherever the President is not. Want to cover the oil spill? Go out on the boats of pissed-off fishermen cleaning up BP oil. Want to investigate the impact of the stimulus act? Go hang out with the construction workers drinking Red Bull on the side of the freeway. (Want to cover the President? Fine. Go on a trip every other month. The rest of the time, watch him live on your computer, read the pool reports, run the pool photos—and then go talk to your sources about what is really going on.)

Unfortunately, the money saved by cutting White House coverage will not now shift to enterprise reporting. It’s too late for that. It will go towards the bottom line at places where the bottom line is deep underwater. But that’s a mistake. Because there are important stories to be told, and they have almost never been located in a ballroom at a Holiday Inn surrounded by satellite trucks.

Check out Thomas Friedman’s column in the New York Times this week. He argues that Obama is missing a massive opportunity in the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico, and I think he is right.

“Sadly, President Obama seems intent on squandering his environmental 9/11 with a Bush-level failure of imagination. So far, the Obama policy is: “Think small and carry a big stick.” He is rightly hammering the oil company executives. But he is offering no big strategy to end our oil addiction….Please don’t tell us that our role is just to hate BP or shop in Mississippi or wait for a commission to investigate. We know the problem, and Americans are ready to be enlisted for a solution.”

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill leaves us all, regardless of politics, with a pit in our stomachs—a sense that something awful is happening, and there is no satisfying way to place blame, much as we’d like to. The thick sludge washing up on the shores of Louisiana belongs to BP, but also to the rest of us. That’s why more than 5,000 people have submitted ideas to a suggestion box set up by BP and the Coast Guard for how to respond to the spill. That’s why people all over the world have sent hundreds of thousands of pounds of hair (yes! hair!) to help sop up the oil, even though it’s unclear how effective such containment booms will be.

As is the case in every disaster I have studied, the primary public reaction to catastrophe is positive and powerful: We urgently want to do something to help. The public wants to be part of a big solution—not a congressional inquisition. But we don’t know what to do.

We want to think big, to make changes, to sacrifice so that this doesn’t happen again—and yet. We are told to stay home and let the people in charge keep doing what they’re doing, however poorly they are doing it.

All that energy is draining away, just like it did after 9/11, slipping into a leadership void, dissipating until we are left feeling just helpless and fatalistic. And that poisonous combination of helplessness and fatalism does not end here. That attitude is, I promise you, the best way to guarantee more disasters of all kinds in the future.

I suppose it’s premature to get excited about this, but I was happy to see this small victory for evidence-based research come out of Colorado:

In a “ripped from the headlines” manner, two lawmakers, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, unveiled a measure Friday that would pay children to read, replicating a program profiled recently in Time magazine that has met with controversy but also success.
Dubbed “Earn to Learn,” the measure would give low-income kids a financial incentive to improve their reading skills by reading more outside the classroom….Sponsored by Democrat Sen. Chris Romer, of Denver, and Senate Minority leader Josh Penry, of Grand Junction, Senate Bill 210 is patterned after research that uses economic principles to incentivize kids to learn.

OK, so I have a vested interest in this, it’s true. That was my story, and I want it to lead to something. But I am just as excited to see politicians thinking in such a rational way about education spending, period. Despite the fact that we spend more per pupil on education than the vast majority of rich countries (most of which also get far better returns on their investment), we almost never direct this money towards policies that have been rigorously tested. We direct the money towards practices that feel good or are politically safe. I will be curious to hear what comes of this.

Second most important detail to come out so far about the attempted bombing of Times Square on Saturday evening: People did not freak out.

How many movies have imagined chaos in Times Square at the slightest threat of danger? Now we know that the reality is a lot less cinematic. As is the case in almost every disaster I have studied, from terrorist attacks to sinking ships to airplane crashes, regular people become calm, quiet and obedient… because it’s in their interest to do so.

From CNN:

Pamela Hall was at a McDonald’s when a police officer told her to pick up her food and leave.

“They told us to go straight to 47th Street,” Hall said. “Nobody was frightened. The cops weren’t upset and the people were not noticeably upset. We were all just perplexed. We just went to 47th Street and ended up taking pictures and watching.”

HERE’S THE MOST IMPORTANT DETAIL to come out so far about the failed attempt to bomb Times Square on Saturday evening, from the New York Times City Room blog:

The shutdown began Saturday when the T-shirt vendor, a veteran of the Vietnam War, saw smoke coming from a box inside a vehicle with Connecticut plates on 45th Street near 7th Avenue. The vendor notified a New York police officer on horseback, who smelled gunpowder from the vehicle.

The t-shirt vendor’s name appears to be Lance Orton, and based on his surly reaction to reporters yesterday, he seems to already be aware that his story will be glorified and distorted by the media in a quest to find a hero.

But the more important lesson is not that this gentleman is a hero. The lesson is that regular people are the single most important defense against terrorism attacks—whether they are sharing intelligence about a plot or observations about a smoke-filled S.U.V. And they should be treated that way.

The NYPD has made some creative efforts to enroll the public, including its Operation Nexus program, where officers visit businesses and workers who might be in a position to notice terrorist activity. William Finnegan’s excellent 2005 New Yorker feature about the NYPD’s counterterrorism strategy includes some details:

One morning, I met Detective Charles Enright and his partner, Sergeant Joseph Salzone, at the Peninsula hotel, in midtown. Enright and Salzone work for Cohen on Operation Nexus, the program that tracks terror-sensitive businesses. Nexus squads visit about two hundred business concerns a week. Since the program was launched, in 2002, they’ve been to more than twenty thousand. Jimmy Chin, the Peninsula’s regional director of risk management, was meeting with Enright and Salzone. The Nexus officers wore business suits, and had the intense but deferential air of high-end sales reps. Anyone writing a parking ticket would be more intimidating. They rely, essentially, on the public-spiritedness of businesspeople, whom they practically beg to alert them to anything suspicious. Chin, who is also the chairman of the safety-and-security committee of the Hotel Association of New York City, said, “The N.Y.P.D. is a huge police department that acts like a small one. In other places I go, nobody can imagine the kind of tight relationship we have here. But we’ve really changed our thinking since 9/11. I wouldn’t have given these guys my cell number before. Now they’ve got to be able to reach me 24/7.”

Here are some of the things that officers warn workers to look out for:

* Drivers who don’t want to give their keys up to parking attendants.

I wonder if the NYPD has enrolled t-shirt vendors in its efforts? If there is anyone who knows what is “normal” in Times Square and what is not, it is the guy who has been hawking t-shirts there for 20 years, watching the tourists for signs of interest, watching the cops for signs of belligerence, watching every damn thing for the slightest distraction that might make the day a little more profitable or a little less dull.