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What to say about Iowa?

First and foremost, thank you. Not to Iowans in their bizarre political shenanigans and inability not only to be polled but even to bother to get their lazy asses registered as voters prior to caucus night. No, thanks go to those of you who tuned in, made the chat room lively, kept me updated to the conversation via text message, and of course, dropped a little somethin’ in the tip jar. I really appreciated your virtual companionship on the nerve-wracking and ultimately disappointing campaign trail, as I do your assistance in subsidizing that trip of a lifetime.

I also really ought to thank the folks on Joe Biden’s campaign who put their trust in me as a hybrid supporter-citizen journalist and basically threw open their doors and let me pick and choose where I would do some reporting and where I would do some volunteering. The fact that they ever wanted my help with some YouTubery or other online communications efforts over the last several months has really kept me going when I’ve wondered why I’m trying to balance my technically-challenged dissertation and, well, anything that is not dissertation. They were a great bunch of people to work with, even though it was largely over the internets until the last couple of days.

Their trust was made even more special when it survived an ugly Off the Bus episode the morning of the caucus, thanks to the bizarre and unsourced rumor promulgated by one of my OTB cohorts, Beverly Davis. She claimed to have spoken to one of the Biden campaign’s “national consultants” at a bar on New Year’s Eve, and this anonymous source suggested that a deal was in the offing between Biden and Obama, described by Davis in such a way as to make Biden’s campaign for President sound suddenly less serious, more like the speculative “He’s just running for VP” crap that’s always alleged of any second tier candidate. No one at Biden HQ had any idea what “national consultant” Davis might have been speaking to, nor was there any such deal ever in the work; Biden has a fine day job and was in this to do as well as his bluntly stated positions could get him. The story was posted on the 2nd, I believe, and by the time I got to the office on Thursday morning it was already keeping Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach’s blackberry buzzing furiously. Lucky for me, Beverly Davis referred to herself in the aggrandizing institutional third person, saying, “Off the Bus spoke to…” about her drunken gossiper, leaving a tiny grammatical question in a few people’s minds at that morning’s staff meeting. “She didn’t mean Shelby, did she?” That was apparently one fleeting thought that was quickly dismissed — and solidly confirmed when I talked to staff in person. I wasn’t even in Iowa for New Year’s Eve, and they know me well enough by this point to have faith that I wouldn’t run with such speculative crap without confirming it more solidly with someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about. There was a similar moment in Greenville, SC, when the wheels came off the wagon for a few minutes and the whole campaign caravan fractured into several disconnected clusters when the Senator wanted to sneak off for a quiet lunch away from the crowds and the remaining aides lost track of the day’s agenda for a few minutes. I lingered outside the college fair where Biden was supposed to shake hands for a while and his former bodyman and a state committee member tried desperately to reconvene the group via multiple cellphone messages. The latter, not knowing quite who I was (but only seeing my fake press badge), looked askance at me before he was reassured that I could be trusted not to use this perfectly ordinary moment of campaign chaos to write a smear article, or I would under no circumstances be allowed within earshot of these phone calls in the first place.

That kind of trust raises a much broader question about this new-fangled citizen journalism stuff, as was reiterated to me yesterday by Leonard Witt, professor of communications at Kennesaw State University and networked journalism enthusiast. I will be co-hosting a dinner table discussion on politics and new media with our friend Grayson at the upcoming Southern Social Media Convention in a few weeks at Leonard’s request. In our emails I mentioned that while in Iowa I was a sort of hybrid campaign volunteer/embedded reporter, and it was tricky explaining to some people how that worked; he said he, too, would have questions about how that worked, and justifiably so. Just what kind of “journalism” could you expect to get out of me regarding the now defunct Biden campaign? Would I basically be shilling propaganda under the cloak of news? Absolutely not. For the most part, I provided video to Huffington Post, so what you saw is what you got. The text article I wrote about the Greenville trip was basically presenting the mood of the meetings, the policy topics discussed, and even a mention of the caravan’s consistent lateness and my speeding across South Carolina to keep up. I was not blowing sunshine up anyone’s skirt, to butcher a cliche. But there was certainly a lot of trust between me and a campaign I liked, and I was not going to rush to publish something before making sure it was a real story just for the sake of a gotcha. After the Beverly Davis flap, I asked the communications staff what the real deal was and said I’d be interested in publishing my own piece on their response, whether it was a denial or a “no comment” or what have you. The Press Secretary pointed out that Marc Ambinder had already published the official campaign statement on his blog, and that slowly some of the major news outlets were updating their parrot stories appropriately; as far as the campaign was concerned, that was the end of the story. My decision not to follow up on my own was two-fold: first, and most objectively, I had plenty of other things to work on, story-wise, so if Ambinder had already written it up, there was little point in my repeating old news; second, and perhaps biased on my part, if I continued to make a story of the non-story, the non-story would BE the story, and I’d just give legs to what was bunk in the first place. I didn’t want to do that to the candidate I was most fond of, and so to that extent, I was a biased citizen journalist.

So what does that say about citizen journalism? I guess the usual as with any kind of reporter: caveat emptor. In most of these new media outlets, the goal is not to eliminate or stifle bias, as in the old model, but to own up to and publicize it. You want to hear a bunch of pro-Obama fuzzy lovin’? Read just about everyone else on Off the Bus. You want straight coverage of the positive points of second tier brainiacs like Biden? Try me. You want mud? Try Drudge.

For the record, here are some final video clips from Caucus Day that I didn’t have the energy to deal with for a while.

I’m in New York now getting ready for my MTV Choose or Lose ‘08 Street Team orientation, just in time to turn the page. (Expect some more videos this week.) I think with the testing and dissertation writing on the up-slope at school, and MTV reporting probably taking the rest of the time, it’s time to close the Huffington Post chapter. The Bev Davis fiasco was probably all the excuse I needed, anyway.

I’m probably also done with politics for a while. People have already been asking whom I’m for now, while the body was still warm even. Right now, I don’t feel like I’m “for” anyone. I’ll go into a little more detail on my thought processes here when I wrap up this MTV trip, but frankly, the rest of you haven’t got much to wow me with. You never gave the smartest, most qualified guy in the room a chance, so I’m disinclined to give a hoot about your celebrity right now — and I’m definitely not inclined to waste any more graduate school time getting them nominated. Talk to me when we’ve got one polished show horse standing, and I’ll see what I can do.

Now, time to go hemorrhage some cash in Manhattan!