Televised candidate debates have become the marquee spectacles of presidential campaigns. By the time Republicans vote in the Florida primary, candidates seeking the party’s presidential nomination will have debated 19 times since May. That’s 30-some hours of live national TV, plus untold hours of recap, recrimination and chatter spun off by the events.
The most squalid and anti-democratic element of the U.S. electoral system is its insatiable appetite for money, vast rivers of money. It transforms our leaders into supplicants, required to contort themselves and their policies to please rich patrons.
The U.S. war in Iraq ended just before Christmas, and if you blinked you probably missed it.
The accounts of sexual predation involving coaches at Penn State and Syracuse haven’t yet boiled over into a full-fledged moral panic, but there’s good reason for the media to be mindful of that potential. It happened before, notably in the wave of hysteria — and prosecutions — in the 1980s and 1990s over sweeping accusations of ritual sexual abuse at child day care centers from South Florida to the Pacific Northwest.
All along, the Herman Cain campaign — which Politico called “one of the most hapless and bumbling operations in modern presidential politics” — has been riveting but improbable. Yet whatever the ex-restaurant executive’s other misdeeds and missteps, Cain’s bid seems finally to have crumbled because of extensive coverage of a woman’s allegations that she had a 13-year extramarital romance with him.
For more than a decade, one of the most influential figures in the U.S. news media has been someone few people outside the business ever heard of, an ex-newspaper reporter in suburban Chicago named Jim Romenesko. His influence derived from his daily blog, which consisted of capsule descriptions and links to reporting about the media published elsewhere.
A comment posted to London’s Guardian newspaper said it best: “Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.” The writer, somebody called “edensasp,” was referring to news that Wikileaks — the online whistleblower that has been embarrassing governments and corporations worldwide by disclosing their secrets — was suspending operations.
The really interesting question about the waning days of Rupert Murdoch’s reign over News Corp., his global media empire, is just how much irreparable harm his regime will do to the marquee institutions it controls that preceded him and deserve to survive.
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