And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [68]
This, Harris said, was not The Politico’s dilemma. “We do not have the sense of ourselves that we are out there defining reality—that we are the ones who can validate a story or not validate a story. That’s a luxury for us; that’s a burden for them. If there’s a big uproar and we have something to say about the uproar, we will.”
“We’d probably be more inclined to jump in,” VandeHei said.
“If millions of people are talking about something,” Harris said, “because of talk radio, or blogs, or what have you, you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.”
What they were describing was the emerging new culture of professional media, which increasingly is reinventing itself on an Internet model. It is the culture of the “most e-mailed list,” which almost every newspaper maintains and consults—the Washington Post editors review the numbers in their daily two p.m. editorial meetings, while the Los Angeles Times editors get them in an e-mail every day. Today, to give readers the news they want is no longer cynical but rather is the height of idealism: what is a newspaper for, after all, if not to start conversation ? As primary season neared, the mainstream organizations were starting up their own blogs, looking for faster-hitting stories, generating more e-mails and page views. If 2004 was the political Internet’s first world war, 2008 threatened to go thermonuclear.
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After one spends enough time immersed in nanopolitics—reading blogs, listening to talk radio, watching Sunday shows—one can hardly hear the name of a candidate without the various stories about him or her flashing into one’s mind. Even if one does not care oneself that John McCain dumped his first wife, or that Mitt Romney flip-flopped on gay rights, or Barack Obama did cocaine, or Bill Richardson is alleged to be “touchy” around women, would not these stories matter to them, those apostrophized millions of voters who decide the outcome? In order, therefore, to ponder the truly important questions, which are, of course, questions of prognostication, each reader must take an interest—purely a second-order one, mind you—in these pseudo-controversies as they carom about. Moreover, since so much of the information that fuels these controversies is already out in the public domain, one finds oneself engaging in third-order speculation, even, about which nonscandals could wind up sinking each candidate and which larger, truer storyline about these candidates they will validate. If Rudy Giuliani was vulnerable because of his complicated family history, would his candidacy be sunk by the fact that his father and uncle were convicted criminals? Or by the fact that he once was married to his first cousin? If Barack Obama was to be laid low because of his liberal extremist past, would it be his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, or with the former Weatherman William Ayers, that did him in?
No longer are these sorts of meta-questions the province merely of coastal media professionals; now they are contemplated by tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of self-taught pundits and politicos across America. In one sense this is a matter of simple mathematics: in the absence of additional relevant facts, all this extra punditry must consume itself with something. But it is also spurred on by the media mind, the spreading awareness that anyone can act and see their actions create ripples in the wider world. Most of our new pundits are, at heart, activists, in a strange postspin political climate where message-making (rather than organizing) is seen as the ultimate political good. They are, to borrow a term from the previous chapter, agents, for whom posting a nanostory about an opponent, or drawing an argumentative line to unite three such forgettable stories, is a noble act of volunteerism.
In the early days of 2007, when some seventeen candidates were still in the running for president, I found myself unable to look away,