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!

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.

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.

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?

McCain in many ways ran a campaign more in sync than Obama’s with the 24-minute cycle. The media wanted drama, and he gave it to them. Here’s a surprise V.P.! Here’s a new message! My campaign’s off! It’s back on! Obama, for all his campaign’s use of social networking, online fund-raising and e-mail-rumor debunking, ran a comparatively sedate media campaign.

We don’t know yet which strategy worked. But the pundits who have analyzed the candidates’ styles may be missing something. McCain has promised a “steady hand on the tiller”; Obama, a cool head in a crisis. I suspect that part of what the country wants after more than a year of rabid electotainment is a firm hand on the volume dial–a calming response not just to the economy or to partisanship but also to the incessant shrieking, browbeating, Chicken Littling of the media. They want someone to push not Refresh but Pause.

That seems clear to me now, anyway. But ask me again in 24 minutes.