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

(2 of 3)

The Palin story--in particular, her daughter Bristol Palin's pregnancy--showed just how interdependent the mainstream and nonmainstream media have become. The Palin camp revealed the news after blogs published rumors that Palin had faked her own recent pregnancy to cover up an earlier one of her daughter's. Mainstream outlets left these rumors alone until the Palins' disclosure, but once the story was out, the perception was that "the media" had hounded the family into opening their personal lives.

Related

Specials

A Barrel of Gaffes

Stories

• Seriously, Who Are These Undecided Voters?

What the story really revealed is an ecology that Mickey Kaus of Slate calls the "undernews": stories, true and false, that percolate in the blogs or tabloids until the "respectable" press is forced to soil its white gloves, just as what happened with the John Edwards love-child story. (Wow, how long ago was that? The 1980s?)

The nontraditional media have also controlled the tone of the debate. The blogosphere joined talk radio as a driver of issues and stories. McCain faced some of his toughest interviews of the campaign on David Letterman and The View. And while Katie Couric grilled Palin on CBS, it was Tina Fey's impression that seared the moment into the national consciousness. (Palin impersonations were also among the hottest genres on YouTube.) The Daily Show was, as in 2000 and 2004, the election's dominant running commentary.

The traditional press, then, had more competition for scoops, influence and audience as the election became the biggest pop-culture event of the year. So the news media--all chasing the same ad dollars in a bad economy--learned the value of putting on a show. Formerly straitlaced outlets gave themselves an attitude makeover to keep up with the blogs and Comedy Central. CNN hired comic D.L. Hughley to do a late-night show, and even the stodgy Associated Press started injecting bloggy potshots and analysis into its wire stories. If you didn't snark, you didn't exist.

Hits, Clicks and the Hoff

At the same time, the election and technology bred another, kinder-and- dorkier group of stars: the geekocracy. CNN's John King broke down election returns and poll figures on a touchscreen "magic wall," while NBC guru Chuck Todd crunched numbers on what resembled an electronic Risk board. Meanwhile, a raft of bloggers used the Web's strength--indulging obsessiveness--to create temples of poll analysis. Chief among them was Nate Silver, a baseball-statistics nut at whose FiveThirtyEight.com habitués debate weighting averages and tracking-poll internals until the wee hours.

The audience was awash in data, if not necessarily in knowledge. Maybe the most addictive expression of electoporn was the Election Simulator at 270towin.com where you could press a button and get an electoral map based on probabilities from the latest polls, over and over again, different each time. Click, click, red, blue, red, blue! Like so much prognostication out there, it's less news than a video game.

The campaigns, meanwhile, also learned to use new media to keep the news monster appeased. Web ads were the Molotov cocktails of campaign 2008: quick, cheap and explosive--the more outrageous, the more likely to get embedded on blogs and played for free on the news. One zany McCain ad, made around Obama's summer trip to Europe, likened Obama to actor (and pop star in Germany) David Hasselhoff. Attention-getting? Definitely. Comprehensible? Does it matter?