Democrats' War Has Its Own 'Embeds'
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 5, 2004; Page C01
Marc Ambinder says he spent so many hours with Howard Dean that he knew a month in advance that the candidate would pass up federal funding and raise the campaign cash himself.
"You build enough trust with the candidate and his staff that they begin to act normally around you, even though you're a member of the press," the ABC News producer says.
Ambinder, 25, was until recently one of the campaign "embeds," a term appropriated by MSNBC to describe the boys-who-never-get-off-the-bus approach to campaign reporting. It is a costly endeavor that yields considerable benefits for the news organizations willing to pay the freight, but also contains its share of frustrating wheel-spinning. And the constant presence of notebooks and cameras means that many candidates are constantly on guard, their every move recorded, every offhand comment a potential gaffe.
Marisa Buchanan, an MSNBC producer traveling with Wesley Clark, was there after his first campaign manager quit and new advisers started showing up. "I was introducing staff members to one another," says Buchanan, 24.
Becky Diamond, covering John Kerry for MSNBC, says she understands "what makes him tick" and that "camera crews that come in and out just can't compete with the access I have." Sometimes this produces small but intriguing moments, such as when Diamond, 34, taped the senator playing guitar on his campaign bus. "MSNBC loved it and ran it quite a bit," she says.
ABC's Deborah Apton was with Clark in a Florida synagogue when, in response to an audience question, he began naming potential members of his Cabinet. "I was pretty much the only one who had it," says Apton, 25. "I end up in places where the national press wouldn't."
Not that campaign officials always hang out a welcome sign, as ABC's Beth Loyd discovered while following Al Sharpton. "They tried to limit my access as much as they could," says Loyd, 25. "They wanted to control it. Sometimes it was hard to get people to return my phone calls," and Sharpton "didn't want someone around him all the time."
Another frustration: "It's hard when you don't have a cable network to get things out," Loyd says. ABC's producers spend their time filing for radio, the overnight newscast and the online digest The Note, as well as booking guests and briefing the network's anchors before interviews.
Mark Halperin, ABC's political director, who had the same producer's job with the 1992 Clinton campaign, says the sources developed are invaluable. Besides, he says, "there's no greater way to understand the mood of America than to see which lines in the stump speech work."
ABC stirred controversy last month by scaling back its round-the-clock coverage of Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley Braun, with Kucinich complaining about "the media trying to pick candidates." As Halperin notes, though, ABC has still covered these lower-tier contenders more thoroughly than most news organizations.
CBS has six reporters shadowing the major candidates -- some more embedded than others -- who shoot footage and file for radio and the Web. Eric Salzman, for example, got some on-the-plane video that was used in a "CBS Evening News" piece on Dean's reaction to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Salzman also has written some anecdote-filled online pieces about Dean's evolution as a candidate, such as his improvement in television interviews and how he switched to shirts with bigger collars to cover his sizable neck.
In one sense, the embedding process -- the name was lifted from the Pentagon program under which journalists lived with the troops during the Iraq war -- is nothing new. The New York Times has a reporter on every major candidate. When the field dwindles to two or three, some newspapers, magazines and networks routinely assign reporters to follow them -- though many prefer a "zone defense" approach of switching off to avoid having a correspondent get too close to one campaign and lose perspective.
What's unusual is for reporters to trail nine candidates for months before the voting begins. And in a high-tech era, they can quickly post their video online or feed it to their network.
Some campaigns are happy to play. Dean recently granted exclusive interviews to ABC's Reena Singh and, separately, MSNBC's Felix Schein, who elicited some revealing comments from Dean: "I am somewhat of a street fighter. If someone punches me I am apt to chase them down and I need to be restrained by the people who know better and have been in the game longer than I have." And: "I usually wake up at 4 in the morning and think about politics for three hours."
The tricky part is the tradeoffs that come with constant access. Ambinder wasn't able to break the story of Dean's decision to reject public financing because the information was provided off the record.
"It's a difficult balancing act," he says. "You want to be able to communicate what you know to people, but you have to respect their confidences. Obviously when you spend 24/7 with people, you become friendly with them."
One thing the road warriors have in common is that the grueling hours take a toll. "I don't even have time to call my friend who just had a baby," Diamond says. "If I call my boyfriend, it's in front of 10 people in a press van." On the other hand, she says, "you're on the front lines of the battle for the presidency."
Bloomberg Backs Off
Some Bloomberg News staffers are upset that Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler killed an accurate story about a lawsuit against Deutsche Bank after a complaint by the former executive who was the suit's target.
The electronic story Dec. 5 about Deutsche Bank, a major customer for Bloomberg financial terminals, was purged, and a corrected version sent out that deleted the names of the former executive and the female plaintiff who says she was fired for complaining about sexual harassment and discrimination.
Winkler says the original report "doesn't meet the Bloomberg standard for a story" because it lacked context and any sense of "why do we care about this." He also says the legal reporter failed to consult with the staffers who cover banking.
"Anybody can go to court," Winkler says. "Anybody can file papers." He wrote in an internal memo that Bloomberg shouldn't be "the mouthpiece for litigants." Asked why Bloomberg doesn't simply do some follow-up reporting, he says the case isn't important enough.
As for suggestions that he caved to pressure, Winkler says: "We have lost business from Deutsche Bank and a lot of firms for stuff we have written."
Fox Flap
"Attorney General John Ashcroft Stepping Down Over CIA Leak Probe," said the Fox News headline during "Dayside" on Tuesday.
Only Ashcroft wasn't quitting. Anchor Mike Jerrick got it right, citing sources as saying Ashcroft was stepping down "in" the probe of the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA employment. A network spokesman blames "mistakes by overzealous producers."
Vice President John Moody was not pleased. "Despite a mistaken graphic put up during the 'Dayside' show," he said in an internal memo, Ashcroft "is not resigning or stepping down. . . . There's a difference which most native English-speakers would understand."
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