” ‘We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,’ the bartender said. A neutrino walked into a bar …” The news out of Geneva that Albert Einstein might have been wrong collided with the GOP presidential primaries and the arrival of Meg Whitman atop Hewlett Packard to produce a big bang of analogies and lousy jokes.
“Rick Perry’s numbers are falling faster than neutrinos in a hurry.”
“The half-life of an HP CEO is twice the speed of a neutrino.”
Twitter has done this, unleashing the virtual standup comic in every wise guy who thought his seventh-grade salad days were long gone.
The Twitter feed during the GOP presidential debate Thursday encapsulated the future of media. The conventional wisdom was forming about Gov. Rick Perry’s performance on an answer-by-answer basis as @freddoso, @RyanLizza, @jpodhoretz, @daveweigel, @jaketapper, @TheFix, @jmartpolitico, @guypbenson, @JPFreire, @ByronYork, @mkhammer, @benpolitico, @EdMorrissey, @mtapscott and the rest of the highly “followed.” They led a vast army of Twitter political junkies on a gallop through the fresh material.
It’s hard to spin a virtual consensus of folks who aren’t even in the same state, much less the spin room, and who have finished their work before the candidates are off the stage.
Saturday’s straw poll result brought another avalanche of tweets to chuckle by. “This campaign season brought to you by M. Night Shyamalan” tweeted @JPFreire as Herman Cain surprised the field and the national news media with a big upset of Team Perry.
According to Politico’s Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, the Florida result stunned Gov. Perry and “amounted to a vote of no confidence from dissatisfied activists,” which seemed a touch dramatic. Over-the-top, hands-clasped proclamations are on the rise as the commentariat struggles for eyeballs in a new media world where unique visitors aren’t going to pause to read the long news they had consumed from Twitter long ago.
The rapidly aging new-media-soon-to-be-old-media like Politico and the Hill have to amp up the significance of each event in their reporting because, like the news about the straw poll, it will have already been warmed over and picked over by the crows of Twitter for a news cycle or two or five by the time it is posted. The Twitter horde had moved on to Mackinac Island before the old new media — or is it the new old media — had filed their deep-think assessments of Herman Cain’s surging strength.
If you can’t be first, at least be portentous.
Campaign staffs face a new set of problems: What to do about a faster-than-neutrino punditry? All the names above and a few dozen more have deep hooks into the media elite, and they are collectively shaping the shapers of the public’s opinion.
A candidate’s failure to tackle Twitter today would be like downplaying the visual impact of television right before the Nixon-Kennedy debates.
Media giants, like campaigns, have to ink their Twitter heavyweights to long-term deals before they scamper. Just this week arrived news that Andrew Malcolm is decamping from the Los Angeles Times to Investor’s Business Daily, a terrible blow to an already collapsing old media titan. Malcolm was the biggest Twitter-brand at the Times, and now he’s twitted off.
How will the brain trusts at the campaign centrals of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry cope with the newest of many key variables in campaign 2012? Sasha Issenberg’s book “Rick Perry and His Eggheads” argues that the captain of Perry’s brain trust, David Carney, is all about what works now.
If so, watch to see whom Mr. Carney puts atop his Twitter team. That person is the tip of the media spear.
Oh, and watch out for @jameshohmann. That man can tweet.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
