News-Tip Web Site Drives the Beltway Crowd

Craig Crawford is one of the capital’s most celebrated journalists. People line up to talk to him at parties. His sources beg to be quoted. Office seekers ask to meet him. And when Fox News learned he couldn’t get its cable station at his office, it installed a satellite dish for him.

Who is this man of influence? A top editor? Network anchor? Actually, no. Crawford runs the Hotline, a Web-based political clipping service, staffed mostly by twentysomething kids in bluejeans, for all of 700 paid subscribers. And that says much about the infinite loop known as Washington.

“Suddenly I became editor-in-chief of Hotline, and I had a lot more friends, and my calls got returned,” says Crawford, who toiled unnoticed for 10 years at the Orlando Sentinel.

Now he has a weekly gig as a commentator on the CBS “Early Show.” ABC’s Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, worried that NBC’s Tim Russert is getting more play in the Hotline, are coming to the Hotline’s offices to meet with him.

On an MSNBC set recently, Crawford was greeted by Brian Williams as the news anchor came off the air. “That was a pretty good show,” Williams announced. “We’ll see if the Hotline thinks so.”

The Hotline, a weekday summary of national political coverage from hundreds of newspapers and dozens of TV shows, is the political junkie’s bulletin board. It’s the online tip sheet for pundits and the instruction manual for pack journalism, the arbiter of who gets credit for which scoop, and the stenographer of Washington’s conventional wisdom. It makes no apology for this: Indeed, subscribers pay $4,800 and up for a year of it. And journalists will do anything for a mention.

Even ABC, which can reach 10 million evening viewers, courts the tiny Hotline with calls and faxes drawing attention to its scoops.

“Ready for my suck-up, on-the-record quote?” asks ABC News political director Mark Halperin. Sure, fire away. “It’s unfathomable to me how people covered politics before the Hotline,” he says, calling the newsletter’s 11:40 a.m. release a “major touchstone of my day.”

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Some even plan political coverage to produce a Hotline excerpt. “When you’re thinking of a line of questioning, the Hotline is very much in your mind,” says Adam Levine, senior producer of MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews.”

Recently, Matthews pressed Bob Dole until he would use the word “endorse” in his praise of George W. Bush--the kind of nuanced development sure to intrigue Crawford’s gang. “That was very Hotline-oriented,” Levine says.

CNN political director Tom Hannon, the New York Daily News’ Tom DeFrank, the Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt, ABC’s Peter Jennings, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman and pundit Arianna Huffington are all on the list of Hotline lobbyists and sycophants. CNN’s Bill Schneider and the Dallas Morning News’ Carl Leubsdorf contribute trivia items, and the Hotline gets advance copies of columns by Bill Press and Laura Ingraham.

“Making news to us has become making the Hotline,” says “Hardball’s” Levine.

Conversely, “if Hotline doesn’t mention it, to a lot of the Washington political community the stories were never written,” says Jake Tapper, a writer for the online magazine Salon.

This isn’t entirely healthy. The Hotline, by its nature, encourages pack journalism. By distilling the conventional wisdom on each subject to a few paragraphs each day, it encourages journalists to toe the line or be seen by peers as uninformed--thus homogenizing coverage and allowing lazy reporters to keep up with the industrious by reading the political equivalent of Cliff’s Notes.

“It’s such an echo chamber it’s almost deafening,” says Tucker Carlson of CNN and the Weekly Standard. “It’s a tip sheet, but it’s the product of talk about yesterday’s tip sheet. It’s more than circular; it’s tail-chasing.”

TV producers often notice that their guests are quoting verbatim out of that morning’s Hotline; the quotes will then be recycled in the next day’s Hotline. Last year, insider circularity reached its pinnacle when brown-nosing producers would put Hotline editors on their TV chat shows, and the Hotline the next day would pick up the TV quotes uttered by its own editors.

The Hotline, owned by National Journal Group, believes its 700 subscribers translate to at least 25,000 readers, thanks to group subscriptions and piracy. The 13-year-old publication (https://www.nationaljournal.com/hotline/) is profitable, though, and will move this week to offices in the Watergate complex and build a TV studio.