How About the 2008 Election?

Enough of the Foley kerfuffle. Let’s talk presidential politics for 2008 and the book The Way to Win by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris.

The Wall Street Journal’s John H. Fund takes a look at their book, and finds there is a lot to think about. Helperin and Harris, as Old Media mastodons, reconize that the

Old Media of TV networks and prestige publications now suffer from "fading power and diminishing options." The New Media
of cable news and the Internet are creating a
"Freak Show," they say, stripping away the
restraints and minor courtesies that used to govern campaigns and public debate.

And at the center of the freak show is good old Matt Drudge ("salacious, reckless, superficial and unfair") whose site possesses “singular power” that any candidate ignores at his peril.

One of the powers of Matt Drudge is that all the Old Media read him.

Of course, there are some of us that believe that if the New Media is a “freak show” then the Old Media is a drugged-out wreck, fueled by privilege and access and outraged at the energy and the talent of the young-uns who seem to operate on a wing and a prayer instead of the proper institutional structure of multi-level editing and fact-checking.

But the 2008 election will be quite a spectacle.