On March 28, I went to the Capitol Extension in Austin to cover the Texas College Republicans state convention. After waiting outside the hall for several hours, the press secretary brings me into the room, from which almost everyone has departed. He asks me to wait in an interior conference room while they prepare for the press conference and closes the door as he leaves.
After a few minutes, during which I’ve started going over my questions, a state trooper throws open the door, hand on the butt of his gun, and asks me in a too-loud voice to explain what I’m doing here.
“I’m the working press,” I say, “and I’m covering this convention.”
He says, “I’ve gotten several calls about you, about how you’ve been out there for hours harassing people and threatening people, disrupting their meeting.”
He asks for some ID, and I give it to him. He starts calling in my license number. I tell him that in four hours I spoke to no one, save for one guy from whom I bummed a cigarette. He asks me what publication I write for.
“I’m here for the Texas Observer.”
He looks at me for a second and then says, “I’m gonna go find out who’s in charge.”
He soon comes back with the CR press secretary, who looks terrified. He doesn’t know who made the complaint and it shows. He gives a few breathless answers to rapid-fire questions before saying, “This guy is supposed to be here.”
The trooper hands back my license with some choice words about the prank before leaving. The kid gathers himself and turns to me. “We’re ready to start now,” he says. “We’re ready for you.”
And so my first official interaction with the Texas College Republicans was almost being arrested by a state trooper, who on false reports was chasing the specter of a marauding intruder.
***
This is how a story about the Texas College Republicans turned into a story about something else. This is a development I regret, but it is not one that failed to reveal itself, little by little, every step of the way, or one caused by a failure of imagination.
The main problem – the catalyst for the story’s self-destruction, really – rode in on two rails. The first issue was about who I am. For several years I have written and edited material about politics, and the perspective of that work has been unabashedly and unapologetically left-leaning. If we’re being truthful, I suppose “leftist” might be a better term – I have written favorably about things that made sense to me, policy-wise, and those policies are usually not conservative. I wrote favorably about candidates that proposed such policies, and those candidates always happened to be Democrats. The writing I am most proud of is the boring stuff – my analysis and projections on policy and elections, both avenues that I try to approach rationally – but it is not necessarily what I’m known for in political circles.
As journalists we are taught that objectivity is of the utmost importance. My failing in that regard is that I have a hard-bitten belief that true objectivity doesn’t exist. It is impossible for someone to tell you anything about something that happened without coloring the story with their personal perception of it. Because of this, I believe that the best way for a reporter to get at the truth of something is to be transparent about his or her ideological bias, no matter what it is, and present that along with the facts of the story as he or she observes them.
When I started writing professionally I shifted gears – the journalist took precedence over the activist, much to the chagrin of some in the Texas blogosphere. Newsworthy items of political importance were the stories I wanted to tell, and I tried to tell them from where I was, not from where some antiquated and imaginary objectivist map said I ought to be. In every story ever printed anywhere the journalist is the ultimate externality, the inexorable filter. I have tried to label that filter and describe it fully.
The second issue was that, either due to self-fulfilling prophecy or stereotypes acting more as time-savers than unfortunate generalizations, many of the Republican Party activists and operatives that I encountered while reporting on this story just flat out do not trust the press. This sentiment ranged from reluctant interview acquiescence by young activists – one, in hushed tones, told me they’d been instructed to never talk to the Texas Observer, and another told me that the press could not be trusted to do anything but take comments out of context to serve liberal ends – to openly hostile interview request responses by press staffers working for elected officials. One staffer told me, half-shouting, that the Texas Observer hadn’t been nice to his boss, and that he knew who I was, too, and so he wasn’t interested in answering my questions. (He eventually did.)
The contentious relationship between the media and the Republican Party is a well-worn story. Example: During the party’s Texas state convention in 2008, a man marched like a sentry in front of the media riser with a large, hand-lettered sign that read WATERBOARD THE PRESS.
The partisan divide in American politics, the rancor that has destroyed the political center, created this environment: when I show up to cover the Texas College Republican convention, someone calls the cops. Subjecting me to hassle-by-cop was a simple juvenile prank, but it has a cold undertone: I was an interloper, an enemy. An ultra-defensive attitude has seized upon some – not all, of course, but some – GOP activists, and this will prove to be problematic for the Republican Party in years to come.
The interior narrative of the bunker mentality, the fear and loathing and suspicion of the media, is well worth telling. It is real in the Texas Republican Party. It is exclusive and it is societal poison.
It is not, however, news, and it is not the story I set out to tell. I pitched the story to the Observer because I thought the details of how the College Republicans planned to combat Obama-mania on campuses across Texas were of real political interest. My assumption out front was that any misgivings the young GOP activists or campaign staffers had about talking to the media – or to me, specifically – would be overridden by excitement over new ideas, or at least by the desire to start communicating a revamped message concerning what the Republican Party is. My assumption was wrong. If such ideas or messages exist, I do not know what they are.
I can, however, tell you that after being denied copies of the printed materials from the convention which had been provided to the one other person at the press conference, I dug through a trash can and found agendas and resolutions that could have come from any social conservative playbook used in the last 15 years. I can tell you that initial interview requests that were received positively and warmly by CR members were then totally ignored and never completed – my implication here is that this was by collective design.
I also found a flyer for Generation K, as in Bailey Hutchison. She is recruiting young people, it says, and she is ready to listen. I’m not sure if that is true or, if it is, what they will tell her.
On a different note, I can tell you that the paranoia doesn’t extend to everyone, and that the national CR executive director and several GOP staffers for some Republican elected officials were forthcoming and willing to talk. A few of the state CR officers did the best they could to talk to me, although the results were limited and the interviews had a visceral feeling of danger, like at any minute I would steal their wallets.
But I can’t tell you their story. I can’t tell you what direction the vanguard of the Republican Party is planning to take it because I have no idea what that is, save for a few platitudes about technology or general misgivings about how the Texas Republican Party doesn’t listen enough to the College Republicans. What I did learn, definitively, is that a generation of young activists is being taught to wholly distrust the press, a sacred and valuable commodity in any democracy, and that with some of those activists the idea has taken root.
This is not to say that there are no bad reporters. This is not to say that there are no unfair journalists, or poorly written stories that serve no purpose other than to further an ideological agenda. Obviously these exist, on both sides of the political spectrum. Likewise, politicians have to win elections, and so what they communicate to the press must be measured, if for no other reason than preemptive defense against political opponents. I get it. It is the cost of doing business.
But most of this – the half-secret ongoing conflict between conservatives and the media – is ridiculous. Further, it does a disservice to the people that both the media and the elected officials are supposed to serve. It is something that I am disappointed to encounter, and what’s worse, is no longer a surprise.