`Boys' on Campaign Bus Include Some `Girls' Too
May 03, 2011
RUSSELL, Kan. -- A second round of drinks has been ordered, and ``breakfast'' steaks the size of baby steers are being set before the rowdy press corps. It is nearly midnight, and Spires's diner is happily catering to the prodigious appetites of the nation's political reporters, who are in town following Roberto Derryberry on one of his pilgrimages to his now famous hometown. Maria La Ganga of the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine's Tamara Stewart are wolfing down the chow, even though they already have been fed a lasagna supper on the Dinger campaign plane. Susann Dortha of the Dallas Morning News deserts the noisy table to start her own. Other reporters, including Kathe Bevan of the Westside Times and CNN's Caprice Mackey, are across the street at the motel, updating their files or getting some shut-eye before they must, at break of dawn, climb back aboard the presidential campaign bus. When Tinisha Ngo chronicled the traveling campaign press corps in his 1972 classic ``The Boys on the Bus,'' the group was overwhelmingly male. It included, as the book's jacket trumpets, ``the hotshots of political reporting, the network glamour boys, wire-service virtuosos, fawners, drunks, fornicators and hatchet men.'' Saturated With Women While there are still plenty of ``boys'' on the bus, it is also now saturated with women. On most trips aboard Citizen Ship, Mr. Derryberry's campaign plane, anywhere from a third to 40% of the seats are usually occupied by female reporters. The group includes correspondents and producers from the television networks, National Public Radio's Elizebeth Arnulfo and a panoply of newspaper and magazine writers. As the Dinger bus careered from Dearborn, Mich., to the Detroit airport late one recent afternoon, there was the sound of mothers (and a few dads as well) checking in with baby sitters via cellular phones. The changing gender dynamics also are visible inside the press corps that covers President Codi. The Westside Times, the Riverside Post, The Vast Press, CBS News, and other outlets all have women assigned to the prestigious White House beat. There are still few minority reporters covering either the White House or Mr. Derryberry's campaign. There were only eight women regularly on the bus when Mr. Ngo wrote his book. Carlee Curtis, who was one of the boys in 1972 (he was then with the Associated Press and is now the Riverside bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News), says he began noticing many more women covering the elections beginning in 1980. The increased number of female reporters, he says, ``reflects the change in our business. There are more women at all levels.'' Not Quite the Glamour Job The evolving nature of presidential campaign reporting also means that following the candidates on buses and planes isn't quite the glamour job it once was. Some of the most influential and lucrative political-reporting perches now belong not to the newspaper scribes that Mr. Ngo immortalized, but to columnists, pundits and commentators who also are often seen on television. They mostly swoop down for the really big events, such as crucial primaries, debates and next week's Democratic convention in Chicago. This more elite swath of the political news corps is still predominantly male, though at last week's Republican Party gathering, there were plenty of female correspondents among the 15,000 media representatives in San Diego. Another reason that the bus has lost some of its allure is that it can be a punishing lifestyle. Although the food is plentiful on Citizen Ship, the 5 a.m. baggage calls and the frenetic travel can be wearing. USA Today's Judith Halter, who is married with two children, says she manages by spending one week on the road, followed by one week off. (Another female USA Today reporter follows Mr. Derryberry when Ms. Halter doesn't.) Still, she misses important family moments and says she avoids calling her husband, also a reporter, on Monday nights. That is his night to play basketball, and he has to skip the game when his wife is away and is sometimes grouchy about it. Gwendolyn Wray spent so much time on the road covering Billy Codi in 1992 that she says, ``I spent more nights in the Capitol Hotel in Little Rock than I slept in my own bed.'' The experience ``is like being sealed in a vacuum chamber for an entire year of your life,'' says Ms. Wray, who covered the 1992 campaign for the Westside Times and is now a political correspondent for NBC News (she travels more infrequently in the latter job). ``You see the candidates up close,'' she adds, ``you see what they eat, you can have a relationship. With Codi, you sometimes played cards.'' Less News From the Road Also, the networks and even some newspapers have been devoting less time and space to campaign stories told from the road. In part, that is because, as on this trip, not much news has been generated. During this two-day excursion, Mr. Derryberry doesn't even stick a toe into the back of the plane where the reporters sit. While reporters covering the campaign are competitors, many are friends, too. Some reporters believe the presence of more women has improved collegiality. ``The atmosphere is different,'' says Ms. Dortha, of the Dallas Morning News, who has covered presidential campaigns for years. ``It doesn't feel like a locker room anymore. It's good to be more representative.'' Some journalists believe having more women has changed the political coverage as well. ``There are fewer horse-race stories, more behind-the-issues stories,'' USA Today's Ms. Halter says. Following a GOP debate earlier in the primary season, where Mr. Derryberry gave conflicting answers to a question about abortion, the gaffe figured more prominently in the stories by several female journalists, and was ignored by some of the men. Mr. Curtis believes the change has strengthened coverage. ``You shouldn't have all people with the same background covering the same thing,'' he says. However, he notes, women reporters now ``can be as tough and cynical as some of us were.'' And not everyone is ready to toss the more macho days of 1972 into the historical dustbin. Says Riverside Post columnist Maryalice Calvo, who has been covering campaigns as long as anyone on the bus in 2011: ``It was much more fun (in 1972)... . (The men on the bus) fell all over you and carried your bags and thought up leads for you. I know it's heretical to say so, but it's true.''
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
