The Boys on the Bus
Cheap booze. Flying fleshpots. Lack of sleep. Endless spin. Lying pols... Just a few of the snares lying in wait for the reporters who covered the 1972 presidential election. Traveling with the press pack from the June primaries to the big night in November, Rolling Stone reporter Timothy Crouse hopscotched the country with both the Nixon and McGovern campaigns and witnessed the birth of modern campaign journalism. The Boys on the Bus is the raucous story of how American news got to be what it is today.
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What Hacker News says
- I highly recommend The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse[1] for some fantastic contemporaneous analysis of Richard Nixon and his relationship with the press. One part that stood out to me: Crouse believes (and presents compelling evidence) that Nixon was one of the first presidents to really understand the press, particularly the press of the nascent information age. Goldwater and Agnew were of the more reactionary anti-press strain, as other commenters have noted; Nixon (per Crouse) genuinely loved the press (if not reporters themselves) and relished in his control over it.
- Historical but Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse on old-style political journalism. (Although I imagine a lot is still true.) There's a lot about journalism, photojournalism, and so forth (perhaps unsurprisingly) although so much has changed in the past 10-20 years it probably isn't that relevant to those professions today.
- Thanks for the recommendation - and I'll have to check out "Where the Buffalo Roam" too.
Regarding the 1972 election, Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus" (published around the same time as HST's book) is also worth reading. It's about the reporters on the road reporting on the campaign ("one of the first treatises on pack journalism" sez Wikipedia) and includes various colorful characters, including of course HST, who also wrote the foreword.
- Journalism was supposed to be objective, gonzo journalism is inherently not. Making the author a character in the story is the opposite of what a good journalist is to do…
Kids taking journalism classes might get to hear about Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 (through The Boys on the Bus) and I think there’s a little bit more to that than just writing for young people and doing drugs.
- Just ordered Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus", another take on the 1972 presidential campaign, focusing more to the campaign journalism.
- The author was also a minor player in new journalism circles. He wrote "boys on the bus", an account of working with Hunter S Thompson to cover the 1972 presidential campaign.
