I’m confident that broadcast news viewers can learn a lot more from dispatches on issues and trends, filed from places like the Rust Belt and the New South―than they can from the predictable talking points doled out by the new administration’s White House spin machine, which has already proven itself adept at exploiting political journalism’s process-obsessed tendencies.
Editors and bureau chiefs: Instead of adding another body to the already overcrowded White House press corps, why not send that eager young journalist off to live in Ohio or Florida for a year, wielding a small video camera and keeping tabs on how the lives the people who elected Trump are being affected by his presidency?
They might have been able to have caught the Trump wave before it started and let the "bubble dwellers" in Washington know about it. You might even get a nice fish-out-of-water story where a young East Coast liberal that went to an Ivy goes down South and "embeds" with the locals for a year. Instead of finding endless redneck racists he finds salt-of-the-earth Americans while finding love or whatever. Kind of a real-life reality show without the fakery.
It would be cheap because the reporter could Facebook Live the whole thing and simply file dispatches with a selfie stick. It might be pretty compelling TV depending on how charismatic the reporter is as well. But I will be willing to bet that some of them will go native and come back not as liberal as when they left. However, that would really improve the news rooms in Washington and New York though.
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