The Conceptual Scoop

When Ronald Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times explains what animates him as a political reporter, it is clear why a colleague calls him "The Great Analyzer." "My dominant interest in politics," he says, is "figuring out the evolution of the arguments between and within the parties and how that reflects changes in the country." The traditional approach to political journalism, Brownstein says, is "to collect as many pieces of information as you can," but his own is "to build a box around the information -- some sort of conceptual framework."

Brownstein is ever in pursuit of the conceptual scoop -- a fresh interpretation of the political landscape, a new way of connecting dots into big pictures. Shortly after the 1994 congressional elections, for example, he got a lot of attention with an in-depth piece that compared the triumphant Republicans with turn-of-the-century Populists. It was a smart take and far ahead of the curve. Four months later, Business Week ran a cover story on "The New Populism."

 Brownstein isn't alone. As Campaign '96 heats up and reporters look for alternatives to traditional horserace coverage of elections, he faces growing competition in his search for the conceptual scoop.

Conceptual journalists are more interested in figuring things out than in finding things out -- their impulse is to explain, to interpret, to move from the particular fact to the general proposition. What they do is no substitute for shoe-leather or what-happened-yesterday stories. But it can help people make sense of the torrent of raw data in "an Internet world," says Peter G. Gosselin, a domestic policy reporter for The Boston Globe. And the focus of conceptual journalists on political ideas and culture is particularly well suited for an era of crumbling paradigms about the role of government. "People are clearly hungry for this," says political reporter Thomas B. Edsall of The Washington Post. "It's a period of extraordinary upheaval in politics."

 The genre also holds considerable appeal for journalists, offering an intellectual challenge and tantalizing status-and-prestige rewards. Leading practitioners, such as the Washington Post editorial writer and columnist E.J. Dionne, write scholarly books that win them acclaim as public intellectuals, right up there with highbrow academics.

 Besides, this brand of journalism is fun -- reporters get to make up catchy labels for their conceptual packages. "I basically invented a group of Republicans," Newsweek's Howard Fineman proudly declares, referring to his coining of "Volvo Republicans" to encapsulate a new cluster of GOP leaders with a libertarian approach on social and economic policy. "The fact that you can trademark this kind of journalism makes it extremely attractive," adds Jonathan Rauch, a visiting writer at The Economist who came up with "Demosclerosis" to describe the petrifaction of Washington government. (And just so I don't get accused of infringement, I heard the term "conceptual scoop" from the Globe's Gosselin; Tom Rosenstiel, who covers politics for Newsweek and writes often about the media, noted in 1994 that reporters were talking about "scoops of perception.")

 But more skeptical journalists point
 out that a snazzy conceptual take can camouflage a multitude of sins, including slack reporting and embedded bias, and serve the dubious function of packaging old ideas in shiny new wrappers. "The search for a conceptual scoop can be a contrived game," says political reporter James A. Barnes of the National Journal. "Sometimes there's more sizzle than steak."

The Genre

A conceptual orientation in political and other types of journalism has a long history in books, magazines like The New Republic and The Nation, and the newspaper opinion sections, where opinions and prescriptions are wrapped around the analytical take. In the mainstream press, it used to be a narrow specialty for the likes of Walter Lippmann -- columnists and essay writers, often drawn from academia, with an ability to write for non-specialists. For most political reporters, the paradigm was Theodore White's Making of the President series, beginning with the 1960 presidential election -- behind-the-scenes reportage on the operations of a political campaign. The tradition was followed by such reporters as Jack Germond and Jules Witcover of the Baltimore Sun.

But in the 1990s, a growing number of mainstream political reporters began migrating toward a conceptual brand of coverage, a trend that was embodied by Dionne's influential 1991 book, Why Americans Hate Politics. Dionne formulated a theory: the electorate was turned off to politics, according to his "false choices" thesis, because the two parties had become overly polarized and thus were failing to address the mass of voters in the political center. Dionne described the project as an "interpretative history of thirty years of political ideas." That's a far cry from Teddy White journalism.

One reason the conceptual scoop is in the ascendancy these days is television, with its virtual monopoly on breaking news. "The era of the pure scoop is long gone," political reporter Paul Taylor of The Washington Post says. "To the extent that there is a competitive nature to this business, it's trying to arrange the known facts in the most intelligent, prescient way. That's where you get your job satisfaction." And Newsweek editor Maynard Parker says the "newsmagazine" tack increasingly taken by daily newspapers including the Post and The New York Times puts a "high premium" on Newsweek and its magazine brethren "to be faster to spot trends and move on them."

Another reason is that after the frustrating 1992 campaign, many reporters were looking for alternatives to horserace and strategy coverage. The campaign was "a humbling experience" for the press, says Gerald F. Seib, Wall Street Journal political reporter and editor and former defense and foreign-policy reporter. "The whole Perot phenomenon showed that there was a group of issues and a particular populist approach to issues that wasn't really reflected in the conventional political dialogue or the conventional political journalism."

After the election, the Journal and the Los Angeles Times created for Seib and Brownstein, respectively, what might be called the conceptual column. Both Seib's "Capital Journal" and Brownstein's "Washington Outlook" run on the news pages, not the opinion pages. Both strive for more depth and intellectual adventure than the traditional day-after-the-big-event sidebar news analysis. Their goal is to bundle the facts into new interpretive takes, shorn of the opinions and prescriptions of the editorial and op-ed pages. A recent Seib entry, for example, offered a new twist on popular discontent with the federal government, commonly reported as a narrowly channeled suspicion of Washington. Drawing on public opinion research findings that Americans were also very worried about a spate of mergers that were producing large, remote corporations, he suggested that the real problem runs broader and deeper than distrust of government -- it was "fear of big," whether the institution was a government, a business, or even a large labor union. He came up with a conceptual tag -- a ulture of suspicion" -- that encompassed such sentiments.

Edsall of the Post gravitated toward a conceptual approach when he became convinced that "news stories don't tell the truth -- there may be things taking place in a traditional hard-news story that cannot be described, encompassed or conveyed to the reader." In particular, Edsall's longstanding, political-sciency focus on the nexus between American politics and race, class, and gender equips him with a kind of conceptual flashlight that can illuminate the shadows, or subtext, of events, yielding stories that sometimes elude less conceptually oriented reporters.

Another factor behind the emergence of the conceptual genre is the white-collarization of journalism: the craft's growing share of educationally credentialed reporters who resisted their parents' pleas to go to law school -- high achievers who are confident of their ability to synthesize complicated matters, stimulated by the intellectual challenge, eager to establish marks as thinkers and have a voice in the policy arena. Check out Dionne's resume. As a Harvard undergraduate (class of 1973), he learned the techniques of public-opinion analysis from teachers including William Schneider, now a political analyst (with a conceptual bent) for CNN. His first job was to help set up The New York Times/CBS News Poll; he earned a doctorate in political sociology from Oxford and was a political reporter for the Times before joining the Post. Dionne is also typical of the political reporter pool of which the conceptualizers are members -- they are a mostly white male crew.

The shift toward conceptual coverage of politics is paralleled and fostered by the growing influence of conceptually oriented strategists in the political arena -- big-picture intellectual types such as Republican guru William Kristol, the ex-Harvard political scientist and Bush White House staffer who's the editor of The Weekly Standard, and Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, the ex-Yale political scientist who's an adviser to President Clinton. Different milieus breed different kinds of reporters; in the Teddy White era, when hard-boiled party chairmen ran the political world, the political-reporting crew was more hard-boiled too. Brownstein says his Rolodex is "not great on county chairmen" -- but that's no longer such a handicap.

Not everyone on the Campaign '96 bus views the conceptual scoop as the ultimate prize. "I get more excited over breaking some kind of story that reveals an underside of American politics in stark detail that the American public was not aware of," says Richard L. Berke, chief political correspondent for The New York Times. He sometimes writes conceptually oriented pieces for the Sunday "Week in Review" section but is better known for such gumshoe efforts as his page-one exposŽ of how fiercely Dick Morris, Clinton's controversial political guru, had criticized Clinton's character when he was working for Republicans.

 However, many of Berke's colleagues, including the Times's Michael Wines and others, are happily stepping into a void left by professional academics, who have tended to write on ever-narrower topics for ever-more-specialized audiences. The conventional wisdom is that academics tend to know the right questions but have no idea how to get the answers, and traditional journalists tend to know how to get the answers but have no idea what the right questions are. Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, says conceptual journalism can bridge this gap, and not only in political coverage. For example, James Fallows and Nicholas Lemann of The Atlantic Monthly (both began at The Washington Monthly) have long specialized in ambitious conceptual pieces on a variety of subjects. Lemann has explored the workings of American meritocracy for years, and, in a kind of sociological fashion, has identified alternative paths to success.

And conceptual journalists can also counteract too-facile reporting about complex ideas. In a recent New Republic cover piece on "Newt's Not-So-Weird Gurus," John B. Judis, an ex-graduate student in philosophy at Berkeley, traced the philosophical evolution of futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler (beginning with an embrace of Marxism in the 1950s) and showed that the Tofflers aren't the nutball conservatives they had been depicted as in the press and have, in fact, been prescient about a lot of changes in work and society. Judis has a knack for using history as a lens for examining contemporary politics. Formerly a reporter for In These Times, he says he was "intellectually raised as a Freudian, a Wittgensteinian, and a Marxist."

Many academics welcome the dialogue with journalists. "When I have conversations with leading journalists I might as well be talking to my brighter colleagues," says Everett Carll Ladd, a political scientist at the University of Connecticut who's also the executive director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. Since he took over the center in 1977, Ladd adds, there has been "a continuing enlargement of the reach and range of questions" he gets from journalists and a shift toward "academic" sorts of discussions.

The Washington Post's veteran team of political journalists is a mini-political-science department unto itself -- even to the extent of a publish-or-perish imperative. Dionne is wrapping up a new book on the promise of a new kind of progressive politics. Inspired by his late father-in-law, political theorist Karl W. Deutsch, Edsall has written books on race and class in American politics and is now writing a third one on gender; he's a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Reporter/columnist David Broder's voluminous oeuvre includes a book on the decline of political parties; reporter Dan Balz has just finished writing a book with the L.A. Times's Brownstein on how the evils of Big Government replaced communism as the centralizing organizing force for the postÐcold war Republican party. The Post gives its staff plenty of leeway to stretch their intellectual muscles on academic fellowships and leaves; Dionne was a resident scholar in 1994 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and reporter Taylor spent half his time this fall on the Princeton campus teaching a course on the press and politics.

Dangers

Conceptual journalism is easy to do sloppily and hard to do well -- the journalistic equivalent of brain surgery, it requires a delicate touch. The danger is a genre that marries the worst features of journalism and the academy -- journalistic shallowness and academic isolation from the real world.

 "A thoughtful critic needs four things -- intellect, special expertise, time for reflection, and an attitude of judiciousness," says Ted J. Smith III, a journalism professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "If you wanted to pick a group of people who are almost uniquely unfit for that role, you'd pick journalists."

Journalists themselves say they're not sure what the standards are. "There is a certain level of high-wiredness in all of this," Brownstein says. The possible missteps:

 Bias and Overstepping. The interpretive approach lends itself to prescribing and editorializing, as critics including Rosenstiel have pointed out. For example, Newsweek's Joe Klein didn't stop at offering a diagnosis of the "radical middle" in American politics -- he suggested four ways for politicians to reach these voters, which he implicitly endorsed. Journalists aren't political consultants; when they're not writing explicit opinion columns or essays, the conceptualizers best serve their readers by aspiring to an analytic neutrality. A neutral tack is particularly valuable these days as a counterweight to the proliferation of conceptual pieces by partisans like Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

 Trickle-Down Journalism. Senior editor Jerry Adler says Newsweek often gets its ideas from writers at "little magazines" like The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's, and "with our reporting resources we can package them for a larger market. . . . There's some value added in what we do." Or value subtracted. Last July, Newsweek ran a cover story on "The Overclass," a term adapted from The Next American Nation, a high-concept book by New Republic senior editor Michael Lind. Lind warned of the growth of a "white overclass" of rich managers and professionals ominously "gazing down on America from gated communities or the more exclusive suburbs." Newsweek put that into the blender, combined it with a new analysis of the American meritocracy by Lemann of The Atlantic, and served up a gee-whiz People-magazinish spread that featured "The Overclass 100" -- a list of yuppie high-achievers, including many non-whites, in the arts and media, business, finance and law, politics and government, and the like. There was even an "Overclass Pop Quiz" -- with such questions as, "True or false: You can tell the difference between a Manet and a Monet."

"I was appalled by it," Lind says. "It shows how, when somebody even attempts serious intellectual journalism, it gets totally denatured and debased to fit into preexisting categories of thought. By the way," he adds, "they left me out of the Overclass 100." Newsweek editor Parker retorts: "Although we took his term, we're not signing onto everything he said." Minorities, Parker says, can be members of an overclass, adding, "I think we can have a little fun with this concept."

New Republic-itis: The danger of conceptual scoops, Dionne says, "is to try to put a clearer definition on things than actually exists." Boutique magazines like The New Republic do this in an almost formulaic fashion in their roles as intellectual provocateurs. A grand, often contrarian, thesis is presented and argued with verve -- for example, Lind's TNR cover piece in August on "The Incredible Growing Presidency," which challenged the conventional wisdom that Congress had captured power at the expense of the White House. Such stuff can be good fun to read but often suffers from thin reporting and a carts-before-horses problem -- headline first, story later.

 Peter Braestrup, a former military correspondent for The Washington Post, deplores what he calls "hypothesis" stories by "the indoor boys" -- whiz kids "who have never been shot at." And Brownstein says, "The biggest risk in all of this is that you get to a point where you stop talking to people -- because you're more interested in what you think than what people have to say."

Shiny New Wrappers. Sometimes the impulse to invent labels for every contour on the political landscape results in the mere repackaging of old news. In 1994, Los Angeles Times magazine staff writer Nina J. Easton coined "Retro-cons" to describe a supposedly new cluster of Republican thinkers hostile to the welfare state, including William Bennett and Charles Murray, who she said took their cues from conservative philosophers of earlier centuries. But a generation of conservative thinkers have done so, and it's not obvious how the "Retro-cons" differ from the cluster of thinkers widely known as "neo-conservatives" who cropped up in the '60s and '70s. Back in 1971, the godfather of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, was warning of "the fundamental problems of our welfare system" and urging policy makers to re-read Alexis de Tocqueville.

Close Conceptual Quarters. The ties of intellectual community spun by practitioners of the conceptual genre pose tricky problems for peer-group and source relationships. At the same time that Brownstein and the Post's Balz were competing with each other as political reporters for rival newspapers, they were also co-writing an ambitious book on the Republican political ascendancy. And should Brownstein have agreed to read and critique the manuscript of pollster Greenberg's new book, Middle Class Dreams? He doesn't see any impropriety -- and he may be right. "I wouldn't read a Greenberg memo to Clinton and say, 'You're giving him the wrong advice,' Brownstein says. "This was something for the public." But he asked another close conceptual source, Peter Wehner, policy director at the conservative advocacy group Empower America, to critique a chapter of his and Balz's manuscript. Wehner says he views Brownstein as "an intellectual" with whom he can have "a real conversation" at a level few other journalists meet. Intellectual fellowship is a valuable thing, but at the end of the day, Greenberg advises the president, Wehner tries to advance the conservative ball, and Brownstein covers politics for the L.A. Times.

The shift into the Knowledge Era is changing what it means to be a political reporter. The conceptualizers are postmodern journalists -- more interested in subtext than in text.

 Entry into the intellectual class is a mixed blessing for journalists: already, as The Economist's Jonathan Rauch notes, the conceptualizers face unhealthy pressures to produce books in order to show they're more than "just" reporters. Still, by deconstructing the political dialogue, these journalists can meet what Dionne calls a need for "an investigative reporting of ideas" in political life. And they can aid a public swamped with information but starved for explanation.

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