New News News

Julian Sanchez pithily summarizes “The New News Cycle” in far fewer words than I usually achieve.

David Roberts tweets:  “Every ‘winger-driven faux story now has two phases. First headline: “Faux story!” Second: “Faux story becomes huge story!” Pathetic.”

This is actually a bit truncated.  The steps are:

1. Faux Story
2. Why is the Em-Ess-Em ignoring this huge Faux Story?
3. After days or weeks of flood-the-zone coverage across multiple conservative media outlets, some significant portion of the base is convinced that the faux story is true and/or significant.
4. Mainstream press takes note of (3) and speculates about the political and electoral consequences
5. Panicked Democrats react as though the faux story is true and/or significant
6. See, we told you it was a huge story!

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I guess I should be aiming to keep it pithy, which is the aim of a really good writer.  Maybe if I were a good writer, people would actually read this.