Other gay reporters have taken similar lines of inquiry with Buttigieg. On the bus in Franklin, New Hampshire, Del Aguila asked Buttigieg whether he had any gay mentors. There was one person, Buttigieg replied. It was a military veteran and person of faith “who just let me know it’s OK to be a Christian veteran gay American, but I did not grow up with a lot of out gay people in my life,” he responded. Jeremy Peters chronicled Buttigieg’s years in the closet for the New York Times with a level of detail no other reporter has replicated and also got Buttigieg to detail the story in an episode of The Daily. “It’s helped facilitate really deep, thoughtful conversations about what it was like to be in the closet up until his 30s, what it was like coming out, how it affected him as a young man, how it affects him today on the campaign,” Smith says of the fact that gay reporters are covering the campaign. “It’s really hard imagining those conversations happening—him opening up in such a way—if we did not have so much representation from LGBTQ reporters.”

As a black and gay journalist, the Post’s Capehart has had an even more singular window into Buttigieg’s campaign, particularly as he has struggled to win over black voters. In a November 2019 column headlined “The ugly lie about black voters and Pete Buttigieg,” Capehart tackled the stereotype that African Americans in states such as South Carolina are homophobic. At the time, a memo had leaked from the Buttigieg campaign summarizing the results of a focus groups that showed the candidate wasn’t faring well with black voters there. “Black voters don’t own homophobia and they are not monolithic,” Capehart wrote. “Black voters have their specific concerns and they have hopes, dreams and aspirations that are as American as they come.”

Last April, at Iowa campaign stops in Des Moines, Fort Dodge and Marshalltown, Buttigieg found himself trailed by far-right protests organized by Randall Terry, an anti-abortion activist. Terry and a few other protesters would show up and shout at Buttigieg and voters to “Remember Sodom and Gomorrah.” “The condition of my soul is in the hands of God, but the Iowa caucuses are up to you,” Buttigieg responded in Des Moines. In Marshalltown, a man traveling with Terry dressed up as Buttigieg whipped a man dressed up as Jesus, while a man dressed up as Satan stood nearby.

NBC’s Josh Lederman took all of this in, watching a tableau play out that showed him a side of America that criticized his own sexuality. “You are covering something that is unprecedented, which is a major openly gay presidential candidate having to contend with protesters shouting vulgarities about their sexuality at them during a campaign event,” says Lederman, who documented the episode for NBC News. “I don’t think that’s ever happened in our country’s political history.”

Josh Lederman questions Pete Buttigieg after a town hall meeting in South Bend, Indiana, on June 24, 2019. | Aaron Franco/NBC News

“The fact of the matter is that gay rights issues, same-sex marriage, other issues like that, are still matters of public controversy in our country,” says Lederman, who pitched his editors on covering Buttigieg around his launch in April after Buttigieg had raised $7 million in the first fundraising quarter. “There are people on both sides of that issue, and so I consider it a professional responsibility not to weigh in on those issues. Now, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have aspirations for my own life and my own family, but it’s really important to keep a wall there and keep a distinction between that and your reporting, particularly when it comes to politics and presidential candidates. I would consider it a professional and personal failure if my coverage of Pete Buttigieg was distinguishable from the coverage that a straight journalist would give to him.” In this, he’s different from other reporters, like Bixby, who believe their sexual orientation should deeply inform their approach to Buttigieg.



***

In Boys on the Bus, Crouse assails the “womblike conditions” of embedded coverage as “pack journalism,” arguing that reporters who travel with candidates day in and day out are often insulated and ambitious, lavishing softball coverage on their candidates to advance their careers in the hopes that their careers will rise with those of the candidates they cover. “The reporters attached to George McGovern had a very limited usefulness as political observers, by and large, for what they knew best was not the American electorate but the tiny community of the press plane, a totally abnormal world that combined the incestuousness of a New England hamlet with the giddiness of a mid-ocean gala and the physical rigors of the Long March.”

“Trapped on the same bus or plane, they ate, drank, gambled, and compared notes with the same bunch of colleagues week after week,” Crouse wrote.

The reporters who cover Buttigieg have not escaped this criticism. Columbia Journalism Review media columnist Jon Allsop opined in December that Buttigieg has benefited from “an early, fluffy flurry of coverage” that “helped Buttigieg to stand out from the crowded Democratic field, despite his thin track record and self-professed lightness on policy specifics."

“Deep breaths, everyone,” the Washington Post’s columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote in an April piece criticizing the media for being swept off their feet by the former mayor.

Mark Meier, a gay Washington-based communications professional who launched the Draft Pete movement on social media in 2018 but who now supports Sen. Elizabeth Warren, told me he thinks Buttigieg has received easy treatment from his embeds. “Coverage from embeds is only now beginning to be critical of him,” he said. “Early on, straight embeds were afraid of being called homophobic and gay embeds, many of whom look like Pete, gave him overwhelmingly glowing attention.”

Adam Jentleson, the former deputy chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who is also aligned with Warren, says Buttigieg got easy coverage. “Follow @DJJudd for a clinic on how to handle your assigned candidate with kid gloves,” he tweeted recently.

“Not just DJ,” replied Drew Anderson, a former director of rapid response for GLAAD, an LGBTQ advocacy group. “Many of the embeds assigned to the former mayor have done this.”

Jentleson tells me he was unaware of the sexual orientation of the reporters covering Buttigieg and that hadn’t figured into his analysis. “My working theory on why he gets the kid glove treatment is that no one really thinks he can win the nomination so they’re not motivated to dig hard on him, and at the same time he’s fluent in upper-middle-class West Wing politics fantasy bullshit,” he tells me. Judd declined to comment on Jentleson’s tweet.