Word: press
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...claimed responsibility for the attack, and the chief minister of the state, Tarun Gogoi, was careful not to blame any group in particular. "We are determined to deal firmly with the militants, whoever they are," he said at a press conference a few hours after the blasts. Early reports from officials in Assam pinned the blasts on the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), a group that has been agitating against the government since 1979. (See here for a TIME Archive story on the origins of Assam's troubles.) Its often violent campaign for a sovereign Assam began in earnest...