The Forecast: Moderate Gloom With Scattered Paranoia

Well, that was a bummer.

Over the past couple of months, I'd come to admire Mr. Romney immensely.  He ran an absolutely abysmal campaign up until October 1, and then suddenly got everything together.  He would have made a superb steward of the US executive branch.  Oh, well.

Now:  Did I call it, or what?

A boring presidential election is a ratings disaster.  It can't be allowed to happen.  So a Romney comeback is a financial imperative.

Furthermore, a Romney comeback is a damn good story.  Think of the drama as the Romney campaign reenergizes itself, retools its message, and claws its way back to within a whisker's breadth of its opponent.  It's the perfect third act.

It's also just the thing to show Obama at his pluckiest.  The beleaguered President, beset by a sea of troubles, slowly gains the upper hand over his rival against all odds, only to become complacent and have things almost slip away.  But at the last moment, he too rights his campaign, just in time to squeak out a win.

All is right with the world.  The media get the outcome they want, and their network executives get to take home their bonuses.

And now, for the paranoia:  If it weren't for Obama tanking the first debate, there would have been no drama to the race.  Obama would have coasted to at least a six point victory, and nobody would have watched the news for the crucial last month of the campaign.

So, if you were a media executive with access to the highest levels of the Obama campaign, and you could convince the President that the election was in the bag no matter what, do you think you could convince him to go limp for the first debate?

Nah.  Surely not. 

Right?

There's the Drama

Romney had a very good night tonight.  Per polling data, he came out on top by more than 2-to-1.

But it wasn't that good a night.  If you believe the talking heads--even the pro-Obama ones--Romney's performance was a game-changer.  That may be, but it's awfully convenient that Romney is now in dramatically better shape.

Golly, I wonder what this will do for ratings?

Where's the Drama?

Looks like Romney's going to lose.  A mediocre convention, a poorly timed remark on the North African riots/attacks, and the leaked video from a fundraiser have combined to drive most of the Republican establishment into a slough of despond, the Democrats into premature fits of triumphalism, and Intrade into a twenty percentage point excursion in the President's favor over the last ten days.

This clearly won't do.  I predict that this will be Romney's low point, and the finish will be much closer.

Why?  Because the media are highly professional.

What?!  The media are biased, aren't they?  Well, yes, all things being equal, the members of the media skew somewhat liberal in their opinions, and it comes through in their reporting and their editorial choices, when it can.  But all things aren't equal.  Ratings are at stake.  Editorial management and their reporter staffs will do what it takes to make a profit, because that's what they're in business for.

A boring presidential election is a ratings disaster.  It can't be allowed to happen.  So a Romney comeback is a financial imperative.

Furthermore, a Romney comeback is a damn good story.  Think of the drama as the Romney campaign reenergizes itself, retools its message, and claws its way back to within a whisker's breadth of its opponent.  It's the perfect third act.

It's also just the thing to show Obama at his pluckiest.  The beleaguered President, beset by a sea of troubles, slowly gains the upper hand over his rival against all odds, only to become complacent and have things almost slip away.  But at the last moment, he too rights his campaign, just in time to squeak out a win.

All is right with the world.  The media get the outcome they want, and their network executives get to take home their bonuses.

Business will trump ideology every time.  By and large, that's a good thing.  But it's important to understand how all the various actors benefit if you want to understand what's really going on.

What Shall We Do With the Media?

The media has always had a somewhat liberal bias, no doubt because the people who are attracted to journalism are somehow predisposed to be liberal. That's unfortunate but things worked out OK as long as the journalists were fairly diligent in rooting out their own biases and the conservative establishment did a reasonably good job of exposing the more egregious failures of impartiality.

Then came Fox News.

Now, I really don't have anything against Fox News. First of all, a network with a conservative bias seems like a really good marketing idea. And a network to offset the other networks' liberal bias seems like a pretty good idea at first blush. But it's really a disaster.

The impartiality of the media has always been at best metastable. It required constant attention to standards and practices to keep it objective. Fox News didn't do that; their target audience wanted a conservative slant and Fox gave it to them, with only the slightest nod to objective standards. Furthermore, Fox was the first outlet to discover that punditry could be fun--and much cheaper than gathering actual news.

The problem with this is that it took the rest of the media off the hook. Once Fox adopted a point of view, other networks and newspapers had to adopt one to compete. Unfortunately, few of them were as clever as Fox. They just stopped enforcing standards and practices, told their correspondents to be more interesting, and let 'em rip. Since the vast majority of those correspondents were liberal, we got a media noticeably more slanted to the left.

This is how we get no serious Ayres investigations, no serious ACORN reporting. This is how we get a series of excoriating Palin stories and nothing on Biden. This is how we get no serious policy analysis of Obama's ludicrous tax and health care plans while every inconsistency in McCain's plans is poured over in loving detail. This is how we get no coverage of the John Edwards follies until it's too late to matter. This is how we get MSNBC.

Please note: I'm not saying that Obama is going to win because of the media. I'm saying that the media has done us a huge disservice by adopting a frivilous point of view in order to compete. This is extremely troubling. Things really don't work very well without objective reporting. Somebody needs to figure out how to have good ratings/circulation while still imparting high quality facts and considerably less opinion.

What's Happened to the Press

From Ezra:

I think one aspect of the modern press that doesn't get enough attention -- either among folks in the media or folks critiquing it -- is the transition from the fundamental scarcity being information to information being in abundance and the fundamental scarcity being mediation. For instance, the attitude on display in this Marc Ambinder post is fully understandable if you take a newspaperman's attitude towards the whole thing. If everyone got a newspaper once a day, and there were eight political stories, and all of them were different each day, and one of them had pointed out that Palin actually did support the Bridge to Nowhere, then the press would indeed have done its job. The job was to report the story, and they reported it.

But cable news and blogs and radio sort of changed all that and now there's too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role -- they didn't create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as "political entertainment."

They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day's events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to. It's sort of like a TV show: If Friends had had an episode where Ross and Rachel hooked up, but never mentioned it again, that would've been weird, but their tryst wouldn't have been a big part of the story. Since they mentioned it all the time, and came back to it, and fit future events into that context, it was a big story. Similarly, if the press reports something and never mentions it again, the public knows to forget it. It's not important. If they mention it constantly -- "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" -- they know it is important. The job of the media, in other words, is now to also emphasize the right parts of the story.

He's right about the transition between scarce information and scarce mediation. The problem is that there's little difference between mediation and commentary, and, worse, between commentary and advocacy.

So the press has a pretty common business problem: the product that they're selling has become commoditized. As with other industries, the way they've chosen to add value to the commodity product is to bundle it with a service. Unfortunately, they've positioned the bundle as, "Buy our information and we'll do the thinking for you." That's terrific in Ezra's world, because there are all sorts of things where he thinks that elite thought is properly substituted for popular thought. (See any of his zillion posts on healthcare.)

In certain instances, this may be correct, but the fundamental problem of such a substitution is that it chokes off the "wisdom of crowds," which generates emergent behavior out of a chaotic sea of opinions. In this way, Ezra's model of the press has the same weaknesses that I've talked about previously. When polarization occurs with efficient information flows, rapid dissemination of information allows groups to form and harden positions so rapidly that there isn't enough time for emergent behavior to generate novel views or solutions of the raw informational events.

Ezra has identified a systemic problem. He thinks that the solution is obvious and harmless. I agree that he's framed the issue in a way where there is at least one viable, profitable solution. While I'm pretty sure that that's fine ultimately to restore the press to financial health, I'm also pretty sure that it isn't enough to restore the public to electoral health.

MSM--or DSM IV?

I have to admit that I'm totally flummoxed by what's happening to all levels of the media. Sarah Palin appears to have caused some sort of rip in the fabric of space-time and it's selectively affecting the brains of anybody associated with any aspect of the press. Any pretense of objectivity seems to have gone out the window. The problem is the most pronounced with the cable outlets but affects other media strata to greater and lesser degrees.

Mickey Kaus has an interesting theory on what's going on:

What we're witnessing, I think, is the death of a media paradigm that we lived with comfortably for, oh, the last year or two. And John Edwards is to blame! Here's the relevant typology:

Model One: There's the press, and the public. The press only prints "facts" that are checked and verified. That's all the public ever finds out about. The press functions as "gatekeeper."

Model Two: Model One broke down with the rise of blogs, which (along with tabloids and cable) often discuss rumors that are not "verified." The public finds out about these rumors, as rumors. And it turns out that blogging obsessively about rumors is a pretty good way to smoke out the truth (see, e.g., Dan Rather).

But in Model Two, the rumors still don't get reported in the "mainstream media"--the respectable print press, the non-cable networks--until they are properly confirmed. Blogs and tabloids are a sort of intermediate nethersphere between public and the elite MSM that serves as a proving ground where the truth or falseness of the "undernews" gets hashed out. Stories that are true then graduate to the MSM.

Model Three: I thought Model Two would be a workable model for years, until either the MSM itself went totally online or until almost all voters stopped paying attention to it. I was wrong! The Edwards scandal did Model Two in. For months, the MSM failed to report the increasingly plausible rumors of John Edwards' extramarital affair even as it became the widespread topic of conversation in blogs, in the National Enquirer, and among political types. The disconnect turned out to be painfully embarrassing for the MSM, especially when the rumors were finally "verified" with Edwards' confession. A lot of what we are seeing now is the MSM not wanting to go through another Edwards experience.

Why can't the MSM bear to fulfill its Model Two role? a) No press person likes to not be the center of attention. You want to talk about what people want to talk about. That's how you make money, for one thing. And maintaining a disciplined silence on a rampant undernews rumor--even an unverified one--made too many reporters feel as if they worked for Pravda; b) Suppressing an undernews scandal about a Democrat subjected the MSM to charges of pro-liberal political bias (to which respectable organizations are particularly sensitive, because they are largely true); and c) even much of the left was disgusted by the MSM's behavior regarding the Edwards rumor.

We are now, I think, making the next logical leap, to a model in which unverified rumors about public figures are discussed and assessed not just in the blogosphere or the unrespectable tabs but in the MSM itself. I say welcome! With NYT reporters and bloggers all openly discussing unverified reports,, whatever is true will become un-unverified that muhch faster. And the public is proving, by and large, to be quite capable of distinguishing between stories that are true and rumors that are still being investigated.

But this explanation doesn't quite explain the Palin feeding frenzy, followed by the subsequent rapture over the Palin speech. That, coupled with the general "aww, screw it" attitude on any sort of commitment to little things like facts and objective truth, seems more like the kind of thing you see in teenagers as they're converting to bipolar disorder.

It's pretty clear that the press is now migrating away from the island of meta-stability that it has occupied for most of the Age of Television. That's inevitable, given that the Age of Television is over. But we can't pretend that information delivery is anything close to reliable while the migration is occurring.

Being a moderate news junky, I can't estimate how the newly-labile media paradigm will affect the average voter. It's possible that all the sturm und drang that occurs in the blogs and the cable networks is completely transparent to the average voter. But there are an awful lot of people now who get their news from the more exotic tiers of the media infrastructure. I hope that they check their facts early and often.

Why Is the Race So Close?

Here's a good post on the state of the race. Lots of breasts are being beaten over the narrow gap between the two candidates and how McCain has vastly outperformed the GOP in general while Obama has vastly underperformed your ANSI standard Democrat. It's all very dramatic.

Might I suggest that the reason for the narrowness of the polling is exactly because it's all very dramatic?

Various media outlets have their little political biases but any bias is dwarfed by the need to make money. That's what the media is in business for. Tight races keep readers reading, viewers watching, listeners listening, and bloggers blogging. And all of those activities keep advertisers advertising, which is good for the media.

I am overjoyed that we're seeing Obama slowly regress from a rock star to a politician. Once he's a politician, we can actually assess whether he'll be anything like a good President. In this particular instance, the media's interest and the public's interest happen to coincide. Let's see what happens.

Just Sex?

The recent Edwards non-story has left the media once again grappling with how to treat the sexual behavior of public figures. Things were so much easier in the Good Old Days when we could just plaster the big red "A" on our politicians and beat them with sticks.

That was nice and simple but then we all got enlightened. It is completely reasonable for the public to forgive the sexual pecadilloes of its politicians. I'm sure a lot of politicans--maybe even most--have them. However, it's another thing entirely for the press to decide what's forgivable and what's not. Larry Craig with a wide stance? Too juicy to pass up. Potential vice presidential candidate or cabinet secretary with an secret, illegitimate daughter and dying wife? Apparently not so juicy. Why?

Here's my take: The old "public's right to know" saw that the press uses when it suits them is pretty much correct. Yes, the public is considerably less enlightened than those august personages of the Fourth Estate, and less likely to forgive various human failings. And there's certainly something nicely human about the press deciding that a dying wife doesn't need to have this piece of dirty laundry aired after her husband chose--in vain--to devote a good chunk of the rest of her life to his political ambitions. But ultimately, it's not for the press to decide what news is good news and what news is bad news. If it's news, they need to run it.

Here's why:

• Hypocrisy. For good or ill (mostly the latter), the disconnect between what politicians say or espouse and how they actually behave is a key datum in how voters decide whether a candidate is trustworthy and otherwise suitable for public office. When you catch 'em acting contrary to something they've made a cornerstone of their public persona, that's news and needs to be reported.



• Criminal behavior. The sex may not be criminal but the cover-up often is. Sorry, guys--I think it was a no-brainer to go after Clinton for perjury.



• Transparency. Politicans keep secrets. Very few of those secrets accrue to the public good. The media have a duty to increase the risk-to-reward ratio of keeping a secret whenever they can. A second reason that the press needs to report this stuff is that a politican with a secret is a politican that can be manipulated. Many years ago, I was told that the CIA didn't care if you were gay but they cared a lot if you were in the closet. An openly gay intelligence officer couldn't be blackmailed; a closeted one could.



• Context. If a sexual incident isn't reported, the public can't figure out what's going on. Ever wonder why Charlie Crist vanished from the list of possible McCain running mates? Think it might have anything to do with this?

It's nicely utopian to think of sex as a personal thing between two (or possibly more) consenting adults. But that's simply not true. Sex is wired so deeply into our biology that it completely controls our family, social, and, indeed, political behavior. And the fact that most people--even politicians!--are fundamentally decent human beings just makes things worse. Infidelity hurts those you love and to whom you owe fidelity worse than anybody else. Having made the mistake, who wouldn't want to spare your loved ones the pain? But the consequences of keeping that secret can distort public life in unexpected ways. The press therefore needs to report on this, unpleasant though it may be.

Of course, the other problem with the Edwards thing is that the scoop comes from the freakin' National Enquirer. How can the respectable press, after years of turning their noses up at this publication, suddenly use them as a primary source? I'm betting that they just can't quite handle the cognitive dissonance. Once the story is more respectably sourced, I'm sure the press will jump on this.

Just Shut Up

The NYT jumps onto the Obama assasination hand-wringing bandwagon.

Look. If anything happened, it would be a national disaster. But the public has no "right to know" concerning this. There is absolutely nothing that being better informed about other people worrying about the assassination of a national leader can do to affect the public good. Quite the contrary; building a national narrative around this can only increase the chances of something bad happening.

On the other hand, whipping up such worries to the media frenzy flash-over point is enormously good for circulation and ratings. But that's it. Equating public knowledge with ratings is morally reprehensible.

May I politely suggest that the NYT and everybody else simply shut the fuck up about this?

How Is This Helpful?

The WaPo has a long article on the US operation to kill Abu Laith al-Libi. Presumably it's newsworthy because it describes the growing use of unilateral US operations inside Pakistan and the attendant resistance of the Pakistanis. But it also contains the following tidbits:

Hours before the attack, multiple sources said, the CIA was alerted to a convoy of vehicles that bore all the signatures of al-Qaeda officers on the move. Local residents -- who two sources said were not connected to the Pakistani army or intelligence service -- began monitoring the cluster of vehicles as it passed through North Waziristan, a rugged, largely lawless province that borders Afghanistan.

And this:

With all signs pointing to a unique target, CIA officials ordered the launch of a pilotless MQ-1B Predator aircraft, one of three kept at a secret base that the Pakistani government has allowed to be stationed inside the country. Launches from that base do not require government permission, officials said.

Now, are either of these juicy details relevant to the narrative of the story? They're certainly dramatic. But how likely is it that Al Qaeda will now change their convoying procedures? Would they have tumbled to this without the WaPo's help? Perhaps, but these guys are not known for being the brightest bulbs in the factory. They do read, however.

The Post is usually fairly good about concealing operational information. This is a pretty big lapse.

Cable News Ratings

In support of my semi-conspiracy theory that the media are making big bucks by treating the election as a reality show, I present the total day viewership of the major cable news outlets on Tuesdays for the five months or so:



Figures courtesy of the late-lamented Inside Cable News blog. Don't ask how I picked Tuesdays; it just sorta happened. I think the chart speaks for itself.

Requiescat in Pace

Toshiba announces that they'll stop manufacturing HD-DVD players. Sometimes the right things really do happen.

The Principle of Maximization of Drama

I take my text this Sunday from a rant by Susan Jacoby, whining about the lack of intellectualism in the United States and a tirade by Jules Crittendon, who thinks that Jacoby is an elitist snob and that things are just ducky, due to the rise of the blogosphere. Well, they're both right; it's a dessert topping and a floor wax.

But I think I may be more with Jacoby than Crittendon on this one. Her main point is that electronic media are busy supplanting traditional print media, resulting in dramatically reduced attention spans:

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

Given that sustained concentration is the underpinning of all difficult, productive work, it's easy to argue that the type of media we're consuming will lead to a reduction in overall intellectual productivity. (Some day, I'll put together a coherent argument that this is merely a long-term trend away from temporal reasoning to a more intuitive visual reasoning, which will result in massive upheaval as we develop the cultural tools necesary to sustain productive work.)

In rebuttal, Crittendon notes that the content available on in the blogosphere is staggeringly diverse, leading to a vastly better informed public:

… and while decrying the dropoff in reading of paper products in the computer age, neglects to note that reading of material from around the world, previously unseen except in the immediate vicinity of distant publishing plants, has skyrocketed. Jerusalem Post, Pakistan’s Dawn, any number of Arabic publications, all manner of deep think, science and erudite satire, all reach hundreds of thousands through sites like these, amplified considerably by the likes of Instapundit, Pajamas, Drudge, Memorandum, Malkin, Little Green Footballs. Voices from around the world, in love with the written word. Frogs, dissident; Brits, upper lips decidely unstiffened; Canadians, small, dead and furry. From Barcelona to Belmont. Who ever knew you could find such worldly insight in the great flyover, sophistication in LA and other unlikely places, wisdom in West By God Virginia or anywhere outside the Beltway? Every man’s a Solomon. Blonde sagacity? Toldjah. Reports direct from the battlefield, and grizzled veterans and practitioners of the art of war to tell you what it all means. Not only that, but you’ll find various wiseacres slicing fillets off various sacred cows and grilling them up for your consumption, instead of being forcefed information as you might have been in the past. And that’s only the tiniest portion of what is read by millions of people each day, brought together and sahring [sic] ideas as never before. Yeah, a lot of it is inane, child-like in its wide-eyed simplicity, or like she says, just dumb. And the dunces have all the infotainment and mindless screen time they want. But the vastly democratized and expanded intellectual classes have never had it so good.

(Note that I'll make no attempt to replicate the zillion links in this passage. Go read it for yourself if you're interested. If you're a blog geek--or at least a conservative blog geek--you've probably got most of them bookmarked anyway.)

But Jules is assuming that a significant chunk of the internet-using population is actually reading current-events blogs, as opposed to consuming pushed video content. Furthermore, he's assuming that what the rightosphere likes to call the "MSM" is moribund.

I suspect the blogosphere has indeed sensitized maybe 20% of the electorate and made them much more interested, much better informed, and much more active in political life. That amount of activity rubs off on American culture; the entire US is paying attention to this election.

The conventional wisdom in the blogosphere is that the share of mind between the internet and the MSM is a zero-sum game: If blog interest is up, MSM interest (and power) must be down. But, for the 80% of the public that isn't reading blogs, they're interested but getting their news from the same old source: TV. So the new divisions of the broadcast and cable networks are actually reaping the rewards of this new interest.

This power is having an unhealthy effect on the election. For the first time in history, enough people are paying attention that the MSM can construct a narrative of the election that the vast majority of voters will bug into. And that narrative can be manipulated to maximize ratings.

Is it possible for a primary season to be this dramatic? What is causing these wild miscalculations, these abrput lead-changes? How is it that the entire nation can be gripped by the loftiness of Obama's oratory? Is it possible that the stars have aligned to produce this singular Year of Drama for the American people?

Well, I suppose so. But it's much more likely that we're being sold the most compelling reality TV show ever. (By the way, I must fess up that I was wrong in predicting that Giuliani would come back in very dramatic, ratings-maximizing fashion. Instead, McCain came back in very dramatic, ratings-maximizing fashion.)

Note that the most compelling theme of the last few days has been to question how the Obama "cult of personality" has gotten so far out of hand. Add to that the careful descriptions of exactly what Clinton has to do to pull back even with Obama and you have the next act of our little drama.

The final act is, of course, a brokered convention, complete with a rip-roaring fight over the Michigan and Florida delegates. If the Democratic Party rips itself to shreds, that will be proof of the MSM's power. That outcome only favors the media. If the Democrats can't avoid it, we know where the real power is.

The World Tilts on Its Axis!

Bill Press and I agree!! Of course, he writes better than I do...

Monetizing the Campaign

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the 2008 campaign is the amount of "free media" being used by the candidates. From the overwhelming number of debates to the 24/7 campaign coverage on the cable networks to appearances on popular talk shows to the use of YouTube and other internet vehicles, free media has swamped paid advertising.

There are several consequences to this. First, the productivity of campaign dollars is vastly magnified. In short, it takes less money to run a successful campaign this cycle than in any recent cycle. This is an odd solution to the campaign finance reform problem. Just when it appeared that money was the end-all and be-all in politics, it turns out that good media relations vastly magnifies the bang for your buck. Higher productivity means that less money is required to run a campaign, which in turn means that the impact of lobbying dollars is diminished. This is wholly a good thing.

Another beneficial result is that the public is paying attention. Turnout is high. The candidates are under intense (albeit superficial) scrutiny. This has the possibility to get real debate of the issues before the voters. At the very least, no nook or cranny of the major candidates' characters will go unscrutinized. If this continues all the way to the end of the election, a much bigger chunk of the electorate will feel like they've got a real stake in the outcome.

But the most interesting development is that the mass media have finally learned how to make money off of the campaign. The cable networks simply wouldn't be providing this kind of coverage if it wasn't selling advertising. It's too early to say whether the networks are making money because the campaign is interesting or the networks have found a way to make the campaign interesting and are therefore making money. Either way, something fundamental has changed.

But there's a dark side to all this. The mass media suddenly have unprecedented power to influence which candidates succeed and which fail. Since the networks mostly know how to market celebrity, Barack Obama, John McCain, and Mike Huckabee have received huge amounts of attention. One can argue that a major chunk of their success can be attributed to the fact that they could be made into stars. If they're stars, they are, by definition, fun to watch and therefore they cause eyeballs to watch advertising. In contrast, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani were deemed less marketable by the media and have consequently gotten less coverage both in terms of quantity and in favorability. This was particularly pronounced for Giuliani, who eschewed the early states and therefore didn't play into the "horse race" narrative that so fuels media coverage. As a result, he was completely ignored and withered away--very dramatically, of course.

Ironically, the rise of the blogosphere has only magnified the importance of the mass media. There's just enough interest on the internet to whet the public's appetite for a compelling campaign narrative. Just like the online communities for shows like Lost has fueled their popularity on broadcast TV, the political blogosphere has succeeded in turning the presidential campaign into a highly-rated reality show.