Will: The CNN Experience-I work here

We went to work at CNN Inside Politics in February of 1999. The office was/is located just down the street from Union Station. Every morning we'd take the Metro from Alexandria King Street into the District, a nice little half-hour commute, or so. We got a lot of reading done.

Now let's get something strait. We were the office equivalent of a hired hand. Not quite a temp, not quite a permanent employee. What me mean is we weren't being groomed for advancement. We were the guy they hired to do scut-work. We were actually less important than the interns. But we saw a hell of a lot.

So what did we actually do? We Xeroxed, we collated, we gathered data. For a while we entered poll data into their system. We transcribed political ads.

Inside Politics was located in a small office of about a dozen people headed by a producer (director?) named Tom Hannon. Nice guy, very late middle-aged Baby Boomer, if you know the type.

The whiff of Bill Clinton's impeachment still hung in the air. We once remarked on their use of horrible looking photos of Linda Tripp whenever they talked about her on air. We were met with a smirk, 'Yeah, well we don't like her very much,' a young female producer replied. Speaking of:

In CNN's case, the decision to put young people on the air has its roots in the 1992 Presidential election. That was the year Bill Clinton and Ross Perot went beyond the traditional news media to make their pitches directly to a wider audience, using talk radio, Larry King, David Letterman, Jay Leno and MTV. Tom Hannon, CNN's political director, said it was this new dynamic that inspired him to hire young journalists this year.

The office was actually loaded with young female news producers, which we'll get to in another post*.

Everything was geared toward producing that day's edition of Inside Politics. Just as we see in the first of the Project Veritas tapes, the day began with a morning phone call at the main table. That table was covered with editions of the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the LA Times. Newspaper coverage set the agenda...and away they went.

*Babes of CNN. 

99 and 20 on

The mind wanders as it is wont to do and we find ourselves thinking 20 summers back, the summer of '99.  For us the summer of 70's retro, The Phantom Menace - the summer of greens and grays, the summer at CNN Inside Politics. 

The summer of one kickass 26th birthday party in which we had everyone we knew over and knocked back a case and half of beer and a bottle and 3/4s of whisky with our childhood friend.

We lived in Northern Virginia and took the Metro into Union Station. Boy was it hot. Thinking back we think of AC. DC* is hot anyway but this was an especially hot summer. We recall watching some Orioles games played in 100 degree weather. 

For that matter for father's day we took our dad to a Yankees-Orioles game, his first (and only) at Camden Yards. This was the summer we obsessed about the Yankees. They won 114 games the year before. This was our first taste of generational Yankee glory and we wanted a repeat bad. Obsessed, unhealthily so, and worried the worry of the powerless, much like we do about politics now. The 1999 Yankees remain our favorite team of the Joe Torre Era. They won 98 games and the World Series.

We went to a CNN outing at Camden Yards, they played the Twins. By then we were a gofer for CNN's chief pollster, Keating Holland. A very nice man, fellow baseball geek and Delawarean as is Mrs. Stroock. He liked to use a keyboard rather than a mouse and told us how he used to work with punch cards. Keating took the time to explain how polling works and we spent a summer collating polls for him and learning how they were written and organized.

We went to a half dozen other Orioles games that year and saw the Yankees clinch the division at Camden Yards. When some Orioles fan yahoo shouted Derek Jeter sucks we turned around and said, 'It is 12-3. Why are you still here?!' Paul O'Neill hit a bases loaded double in the 8th, still the most exciting baseball play we've ever seen in person.

*See what I did there?