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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
An NBC producer's "home movie" of Bush with reporters during the campaign is more "Love Story" than "War Room."
Mar 11, 2002 | Inside Austin's Paramount Theatre Friday, it was like December 2000 all over again. But this time, the cameras are turned on the reporters. Flashbulbs pop as NBC's White House correspondent, Campbell Brown, hugs former Bush campaign aide Jill Angelo; Financial Times White House correspondent Richard Wolffe introduces his wife to Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater. And in the center of it all, capturing it on her digital video camera, is former NBC producer Alexandra Pelosi, with her mother, House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi, at her side.
During George Bush's presidential campaign, Pelosi shot hours of footage, which has been spliced and edited into "Journeys With George," a behind-the-scenes documentary about the Bush campaign starring none other than the president himself.
The documentary has received huge amounts of media attention because of the promise of seeing Bush as he never allowed himself to be seen by other cameras. Adding to the interest have been off-the-record gripes that Pelosi's footage, shot on her Sony hand-held and separate from her NBC work, was not for wide use. ("She promised then-Governor Bush and looked him in the eye and said it was for personal use," a senior Bush advisor complained to Time magazine.) Pelosi maintains she made no such promises to Bush.
Though talk of the film has been circulating around Washington for months, Pelosi chose to debut the film here, in the city where Bush's short political career began; it's also the city Pelosi called home while she traveled with the campaign as a producer for NBC. "This is like my homecoming," she says.
But Austin is also the place where, Pelosi says, "My idealism about journalism died." The campaign made a cynic out of Pelosi, and she hopes to use the spectacle of the leader of the free world jamming his eyeball into the camera countless times to shed light on the absurdity of the way the media covers presidential campaigns. "I learned that I had the appetite for journalism, but I don't have the stomach for the cannibalism," she says.
The movie's sheer entertainment value threatens to overwhelm its lesson in journalism ethics. Pelosi's Bush is funny and charismatic, as are the other stars of the film -- Pelosi herself, Slater, Houston Chronicle reporter R.G. Ratcliffe and Wolffe -- who pepper their one-liners with thoughtful insights about Bush and the process of the campaign.
Pelosi's "home movie," as she describes it, is a vivid illustration of Bush's seduction of the media. And it shows just how ambiguous and schizophrenic politics and journalism -- and American attitudes toward both -- can be. In one of the movie's most telling moments, Pelosi asks a flight attendant if she would ever want to be a journalist. The flight attendant offers an emphatic no, saying, "Life is too short to be so stressed out." But in the next scene, the same flight attendant is seen looking star-struck as she gets an autograph from Ted Koppel.
"That's the whole movie," Pelosi says. "They were totally disgusted by it, but they were enthralled by it. First they're like, 'You guys are all animals, you're all gross,' and then they're like, 'Oh my god, it's Ted Koppel.' They were disgusted by us, but they're totally star-struck, just like the media was with Bush."
Pelosi herself is full of those kinds of contradictions. She laments the state of modern journalism, but is still a working journalist. She disdains the pack mentality of the journalists onboard, but speaks of the virtues of the process.
"People are laughing, but I hope they wake up and think, 'That's really messed up, the way they follow them around like lemmings,'" she says. But when asked if there's a better way to cover a campaign, she points out the virtues of having the pack hang around. "I was the onboard librarian for NBC. They would call me and ask, when's the last time Bush talked about gun control, and I could tell them," she says. "You needed someone with an institutional memory."
It's unclear at times how aware Pelosi is of some of these contradictions. In the movie, we see Bush comforting her after she is ostracized by the pack when results from an informal straw poll of Bush reporters -- organized by Pelosi, with results that go heavily against Bush -- are leaked to outside media. "When they see me talking to you, they're gonna act like they're your friends again," Bush tells her. "But these people aren't your friends. They can say what they want about me but at least I know who I am, and I know who my friends are."
