"As the younger brother takes my picture, he asks why the newspaper is doing a story on me. 'Oh, I'm a writer,' I tell him. I'm too embarrassed to say I'm running for Congress. I make sure he digitally fixes my turkey neck and softens my wrinkles before we e-mail the photo to Folio Weekly in Jacksonville."
That's just one unvarnished moment from Richard Grayson's epic political memoir for McSweeney's magazine--a first-person look at how it feels to be steamrolled by a political machine.
Welcome to the penultimate installment of my interview with Grayson, part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing...Jason Boog:
In your McSweeney's article and book, Diary of a Congressional Candidate, you critique on the state of contemporary journalism. What are the biggest problems you see in journalism now? What can journalists do better during the next election?
Richard Grayson:
In the book, I discuss how just about every article written about me or my campaign had some factual errors – sometimes a lot of them and sometimes very simple things like where I was born. I’ve been the subject of hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles over the years, and most get some facts incorrect...
The biggest problem in journalism today is probably an economic one: how to manage the change as news migrates from print to online. But this is not something fledgling journalists can do anything about.
They are in a good position to take advantage of this transformation since they are young enough to be tech-savvy, unlike their older colleagues who may have trouble adjusting to the rise of the Internets.
I first noticed the coverage of political campaigns going meta in 1970, when I was working for Rep. Richard Ottinger, running for the U.S. Senate from New York.
Coverage of his Democratic primary campaign against three opponents and the general election against the incumbent Republican senator, Charles Goodell (father of the NFL commish), and the ultimate winner, Conservative Party candidate James Buckley, didn't turn on important issues like the Vietnam war or pollution or the antiballistic missile treaty, but instead on campaign contributions, but the amount of money spent by the candidates, their campaign ads, strategy and the gaffes they made in debates.
Campaign coverage is now mostly about the campaign itself. You get the horse race but little about issues. The media will argue that’s what the public wants. Maybe they’re right. I don’t see much Joementum in countering this trend.
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