In a delicately phrased, non-adversarial posting, John Fund smartly saluted this collective blog for reaching beyond the predictable, mostly liberal, verities of the Bos-Wash corridor. He notes that the Northeastern Zip codes of the omnipresent “Metroliner pundits” leave them ill-equipped sometimes “to understand why the rest of the country thinks the way it does.”
This geography-is-destiny argument, which has its merits, cuts a little close to home for this recovering columnist. In fact, it cuts a little too close to my three (admittedly rented) homes in Manhattan, Washington and (very temporarily) near Harvard. It is my fate to have an uncontrollable urge to sign an apartment lease near any airport where the Delta Shuttle lands. In fact, the only thing that is saving me from bankruptcy is that there are no Shuttle flights to Philadelphia.
I understand the cocked-eyebrow disdain for Washington opinion-mongers whose idea of finding the Real America is to head south of the Pentagon in quest of a Walmart. As a New Yorker (despite my small apartment in Washington), I revel in residing in a city where in 20 years I have never heard the word “subcommittee” uttered on a weekend. I’ll be the first to admit that nothing about my life from the neutron-bomb absence of Republicans to my preference for taxis over owning a car is typical. But living on the Upper West Side did give me an early warning about the bizarre popularity of Noam Chomsky’s post-9/11 anti-American rants among the lefty intelligentsia. And certainly with Hillary and Rudy eyeing the White House, this is not a bad time for a political writer to brandish a 212 area code.
The real problem afflicting the punditocracy, both left and right, is a reluctance to go anywhere inconvenient to do real reporting. (Let me stress that I consider John Fund a welcome exception to this rule). It’s a lot easier to opine based on cocktail-party chatter and health-club homilies than to spend time interviewing people who do not share your views and values. I did not spend a good chunk of last fall’s campaign in beautiful Columbus, Ohio, for the waters. An Iron Law of 21st Century journalism is that you can regularly either mouth-off on television or cover the news. But you can’t do both, especially if you are afraid to venture more than 45 minutes away from a TV green room.
During my current one-semester stint at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School, I have been studying how the newspaper column has evolved over the last 30 years. I won’t bore you with the evidence, but what has leaped out at me after studying too many spools of microfilm is how much more reported and less polemical columns were 30 or even 20 years ago. Old-fashioned columnists and personal heroes like Murray Kempton and Mary McGrory were part of the Metroliner culture, but they also recognized that a comfortable pair of shoes (perfect for long hours standing outside closed meetings) were more important to a real reporter than a TV makeup kit.
Ah, a lament for the good old days. Now that’s cutting-edge blogging. Maybe (horrors!) I have indeed morphed into a Shuttle Shut-In.