The Sapsucker Proxies

Enough with the spin room. How about a "fact room"?

by Brian Hickey


	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Oct 31, 2007

I should've known better. After all, the you-got-credentials! e-mail that arrived last week established a lay of the land that, when translated, read: Sorry, bro, you're not getting within 100 yards of Obama or the wicked bar-exam-failing witch he was allegedly setting out to confront. Nope, you're gonna be in an echo-chamber press room where you can watch the proceedings on 10 flat-screen or one projection TV and enjoy an orange Fanta and sugar cookie.

When the bride called and asked why I couldn't just watch it at home and then write, I looked around the room and saw writers scrambling to perfect their best Hillary-as-target-in-chief leads and live-blogging fingers rushing to post quotes that anybody who might be the least bit interested had already seen —since they were watching the same exact thing in the comfort of their own homes, or reading the accurate transcript posted on the moderator MSNBC's Web site.

So, nope. Didn't have a good answer.

Until afterward, that is. Because it was around 11:15 p.m. Tuesday that I got to witness the spectacle that proves democracy as the oft-referenced founding fathers in the shouted-out-birthplace-of-liberty envisioned is on life support, if not ready for the crematory.

After totally zoning out on the big-screen back-and-forth around Social Security discussion time, wondering whether cheeky li'l unelectable Dennis Kucinich makes more sense than the whole lot combined, and heading down Chestnut as the cops guarding the hermetically sealed debate hall sprinted off to help find a dirtbag who just jumped in the river after shooting an officer in Center City, the "Spin Room" made the time investment worthwhile.

The scene spoke for itself, which was a good thing, since the candidates didn't.

The setting was the lobby of the Cresse Student Center at Drexel University, which took full advantage of the national attention that comes with hosting such an event by training floodlights on the omnipresent school banners and admirably accommodating the media crush. (Everybody from a Japanese TV crew to The New Yorker to Phawker had press-room seats — in front of those set out for CNN, the MSNBC-rival that got pushed halfway back in the crowd.)

As the debate ended across the street, student volunteers in yellow T-shirts were given red, white and blue placards emblazoned with candidates' and politicos' names. Like limo drivers at baggage claim, they found their marks, carved out a piece of carpet and were quickly besieged by legitimate writers who'd emerged from the Wal-Mart- and AstraZeneca-sponsored press room and kids with cameras who thought they could change the world.

Trying to fight through the packs to get a worthwhile quote to hinge a column on — didn't work out, huh? — I got a sorta-decent one: Some sweaty dude said that Obama didn't come to fight, that the whole rumble angle was "a fascination of the news media to come here and see a steel-cage match," though the senator never intended to bite a turnbuckle.

I only got to wondering about the wisdom of open-credentialing, though, when I heard one camera-toter start yelling, "This guy doesn't want to talk about the collapse of World Trade Center 7. He's just walking away! He's like the rest of them! That's the way it works here in America." I think "this guy" was repping Chris Dodd, but it could've been Dodd himself, considering dude's polling at write-in levels.

Ah yes, the rub: Besides a calm-and-collected Howard Dean, the bodies under those signs weren't those of Obama, Edwards, Clinton, Richardson, Kucinich, Dodd or Biden. Rather, they had sweaty stand-ins, proxies, hired guns. Their job was not to talk about a single fact. No, as the name indicates, their role was to "spin" stories to their benefit.

Which reminded me of Journalism 101. And no, not because Kucinich's young hottie of a potential FLILF — gracias for the lexicon contribution, Jason Jones — was there in all her red-haired, British-accented, Peace-necklace-sporting glory.

Rather — and sorry for the sanctimony — it was because it seems that We the Press People have accepted the fact that the only access we're going to get is to hacks who control the message. A message that's then regurgitated, because it has nowhere else to go.

Of course, it'd be naïve to think that, in this day and age — and at a campaign phase when there's seemingly a new debate every hour and a half — there'd be an open-access policy. One semantic slip and a camera-phone video becomes a YouTube clip that becomes a nightly news segment that could swiftboat a campaign quicker than saying "John McCain has a black baby" in the Palmetto State.

But in a lot of ways, this is all about semantics. Listen, politicians have never been the most honest of beings; they have to make questionable trade-offs sometimes, hoping that their sacrifices lead to the greater good that most of them want to achieve. But do we need to be so friggin' blatant about it? If so, why not just call it "The Room Where You're Going to be Manipulated and You're Going to Lap it All Up and Spread It Widely Like a Good Li'l Boy Since You're On Deadline, Need Quotes and Are at Our Whim"?

Or better yet, why not have a "Fact Room"? Because at a time when this nation teeters on the edge of irreparable worldwide hatred, the last thing we need is an anesthetized, talking-point-driven public discourse delivered by proxy.

(hickey@citypaper.net)