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.
