Do blogs penetrate the campaign cocoon?

Jay Rosen has a must-read post that relates a Philip Gourevitch lecture on what it’s like to cover a presidential campaign. Gourevitch comes across as the grown-up version of the Lindsey Lohan character in Mean Girls, applying his strengths as a foreign correspondent to a new situation: “The presidential campaign as a foreign country visited for the first time by our correspondent.” The two parts I found particularly informative:

“A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,” he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. The bubble is a physical thing: a threshold your body crosses. If you are part of the traveling press corps, sticking with the candidate through the swing states, then you have to be swept–screened for weapons and explosives–or you cannot be on the bus. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand…. “Right there they have you,” Gourevitch told our crowd of about 50 journalism students and faculty. “Outside the bubble you cannot go because then you’re dirty again and have to be checked by the Secret Service.” Under these conditions, he said, “no spontaneous reporting is possible.” You cannot jump into the crowd with an audio recorder and find out why those people were chanting what they were chanting before they were shown away by security guards. Accepting this limitation–a big one–becomes part of the bubble.

While it’s tough for the press to leave that bubble, it’s becoming easier for outside information to enter it:

Gourevitch joins the bus, and trudges through the morning’s events. Nothing but photo ops and words heard a hundred times that week. There’s a break and he pulls out his notebook. Then he realizes not a single thing happened that is worth writing down. But the other reporters have opened their laptops and they are springing into action. They found nothing to write down either. They’re checking emails, pagers, and the Net because they “receive” the campaign that way. The bubble is made of data too. A trail of meaninglessly scripted events is taken for granted, the emptiness at each stop is tolerated, in part because things crackle and hop so much in the information sphere.

I wonder if blogs are part of what these journalists check. Read the whole thing — and then go read the debate between Glenn Reynolds and Virginia Postrel over whether blogs focus too much on media criticism. This point by Postrel rings true:

Many of the best policy blogs have almost no media criticism, nor do they go looking for political scalps. They don’t even constantly write about the superiority of blogs. That’s why you almost never read about them. Reporters and media critics are bored, bored, bored by the very sort of discourse they claim to support (a lesson I learned the hard way in 10 long years as the editor of Reason). They, and presumably their readers, want conflict, scandal, name-calling, and some sex and religion to heighten the combustible mix. Plus journalists, like other people, love to read about themselves and people they know.

UPDATE: For more on the metaphysics of media coverage, check out John Holbo’s marathon post on the topic.