Campaign '08: The Media's 24-Minute News Cycle

If you're like me--and I hope for your sake that you're not--you have been spending the past weeks visiting election-news sites and hitting the Refresh button on your Web browser. New Fox News poll out this afternoon! No? Let's go to Gawker and see what Elisabeth Hasselbeck said about Barack Obama on The View today! Are those poll numbers up at Politico? Drudge? Huffington Post? No? Refresh!

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After a while, that little icon becomes less an option than a command. Refresh! Refresh! Refresh! You hit the button, take a big info swig and are left thirstier than you were before. It's the pause that doesn't refresh and the refresh that never pauses.

And it no longer matters if you're not obsessed with politics. Because even if you take in only the occasional newspaper, newscast or episode of Saturday Night Live, the coverage you see is driven by the fixations and miniscandals whipped up in the unsleeping election media. With cable and now online outlets that can make anything news at any time, the media formerly known as mainstream are dealing with news that can go through several rounds of attack and counter-attack between the morning paper and the evening news. The 24-hour news cycle that media critics used to bemoan seems as quaint and leisurely as a taffy pull. We're now living in a 24-minute news cycle.

If you follow campaign news, you'll see this cycle in action several times a day, with stories sprouting, blooming and dying like flowers in time-lapse photography. Breaking: McCain campaign worker assaulted! Has partisan anger gone too far? Let's ask the campaigns! Is media coverage of anger biased? Let's ask ourselves! Wait--story was a hoax! Never mind! Next!

Take a few hundred of these eruptions and lay them end to end, and you have the 2008 campaign. As politics has expanded to more platforms--blogs, YouTube, comedy shows--the old press has followed, raising its metabolism and sharpening its tone to compete. And following it all has been by turns thrilling and exhausting.

The Speed of Sound Bite

This is not to say that the souped-up cycle has rendered the election trivial. In a way, just the opposite. This election and its stakes are so significant that people's appetites are insatiable. They want their voices heard, their issues resolved, their lives bettered. Really, they want the election to be over and to know who is going to win. The media can't give them that, so instead they help people kill time by keeping ire and anxiety stoked.

One source of tension is that the media run so fast while politics moves so slow. By February, political observers doing the math saw where the Democratic primary was going--but it would take three months to get there. So the media revved their engines like a car in neutral: SexismRacismWrightBillaryBitterBowlingBosnia! While Hillary Clinton and Obama won their expected states with the precision of a German train schedule, the 24-minute news cycle played each victory as: Comeback! Counter-comeback! Counter-counter-comeback!

The cycle got its most vigorous workout during the whirlwind introduction of Sarah Palin. John McCain's Veep passed from surprise (who is this woman?) to novelty (beauty queen who shoots moose) to scandal (her daughter's pregnant) to obituary (will McCain drop her?) to resurrection (she's a pit bull with lipstick) to skepticism (but can she appeal beyond the base?) at the speed of a snowmobile.