NP: The Flaming Lips, At War With The Mystics

My gut reaction to John Boehner making what sounded like a concession on the Bush tax cuts was that it was too close to the Democrats' opening salvo in making Boehner the poster boy for everything that's wrong with the GOP to be a coincidence. Jay Newton-Small seems to concur:

A Republican goes off message 50 days before the midterms! And not just any Republican, but the one President Obama has chosen to elevate into his straw man du jour.

(Side note to Dems: I know you need a villain, but this strategy didn't work so well when Republicans tried to demonize Nancy Pelosi ahead of the 2006 elections, remember?).

Maybe it's because I'm waist-deep in online advertising data at the moment, but as much as this hint of compromise has been blasted across every left-leaning news source over the last two days, I wonder if it really reaches anyone outside of the pundit class and other political junkies.

It strikes me as a fundamental problem with the hyperspeed "reporting" of the Internet and the news channels that they're low-reach, high-frequency. If you blink, you might miss something that some pundit somewhere has deemed absolutely critical to the future of our democracy, and you'll never ever hear about it again. But the likes of Politico and it's audience have seen it two dozen times, making it an almost unspoken part of a narrative that the rest of us are blissfully unaware of. Hence a bubble is born.

It might not be wise to talk about news in the context of advertising metrics, but as Neal Gabler writes at the aforementioned Politico in a piece apparently lacking any self-awareness:

Even then, there was nothing really new in the idea that the news media are basically purveyors of entertainment, using the same tools that more conventional formats, like TV and movies, do: sex and violence. They love the salacious and love battle – or rather we, as viewers and readers, love them because, let’s be honest, how many people would pay any attention to the news if it wasn’t essentially entertainment?

Of course, Politico would never deign to elevate something trivial into a national story requiring blanket coverage. Nuh-uh.