1) The Simpsons are going to… cable! FXX, the recent comedy-focused spin-off of Fox-owned FX network has claimed the first cable rights to The Simpsons in a massive, $750 million dollar deal (though this could rise as new seasons are produced) that includes over 530 episodes (and counting). This is the biggest off-network deal in television history, adding another record to the long-running series. Perhaps even more intriguing is the deal’s inclusion for online streaming on the soon-available FXNOW mobile app as well as via video-on-demand. More details on the deal and scheduling are sure to emerge before the syndication begins next August.

2) An even bigger deal may be soon on the horizon as Time Warner Cable appears to be on the market with interest from both Comcast and Charter. First, the Wall Street Journal reported Charter Communications Inc. was nearing an agreement to raise funds for the purchase, a move that falls in line with Liberty Media’s John Malone’s (which owns 27% of Charter) recent pushes for cable consolidation. If that wasn’t enough, CNBC reports Comcast is also interested in a deal for Time Warner Cable, a move supported by their shareholders. This officially makes Time Warner Cable the belle of the ball, as TWC stock jumped to a 52-week high amid the purchase chatter. The FCC hasn’t said anything yet because of course not. But one has to wonder what role they’ll play.

3) Speaking of those guys, the FCC, under newly-appointed chairman Tom Wheeler, has voted to raise the cap on how much foreign entities can own of broadcast stations, both radio and television. Currently, there is a 25% cap on how much foreign companies can invest, a level current commissioners are described as outdated.

4) A new study out of (the) Ohio State University and Annenberg Public Policy Center has found the level of gun violence in PG-13 films is now greater than R-rated films. The study looked at 945 films from 1950 to 2012, noting an overall increase in gun violence and a marked increase in PG-13 rated films since that rating’s inception. The authors call for new restrictions from the MPAA as related to gun violence, particular in those lower rated films.

5) Two of the most iconic pop culture figures of the last 50 years, Superman and James Bond, have now had long-standing copyright lawsuits settled. First, Warner Bros. won an appeal case against the estates of Superman co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, ending a copyright claim filed back in 2003 and giving them complete control. Next, MGM & Danjaq have now acquired all copyrights for James Bond after settling with the estate of Kevin McClory, who opened the case 50 years ago after claiming he proposed the idea for making a Bond film to creator Ian Fleming.

6) A big courtroom victory for Google and fair use as a federal judge has ruled Google Books is considered fair use and “provides significant public benefits.” The case had been active for nearly 10 years, when a coalition of authors and publishers started the case in 2005. The ruling will surely move to appeal, but the precedent for fair use is powerful and will certainly have impact beyond just Google’s service.

7) From lawsuits ending to one just beginning: the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) held a conference where they announced their intention to take legal action against music lyric websites, claiming the sites profit from copyrighted works through their ad revenues. The publishers have targeted 50 websites and sent takedown notices, claiming they will not push for legal action unless the requests for heeded.

8) A new wrinkle in the enduring, critical lawsuits against network streaming startup Aereo as the National Football League and Major League Baseball have taken a side against Aereo, claiming they will move all of their games to cable if Aereo is found to be legal. This “friend of the court” filing with the Supreme Court aims to sway judges and show support for the multiple broadcasters taking Aereo to court. Barry Driller, a major investor of Aereo, doesn’t seem fazed, claiming the NFL is “just making noise.”

9) In the same week Sony released its next-generation video game console Playstation 4 with over 1 million sales, the company announced plans to cut $100 million from Sony Entertainment, making the company leaner and more focused. A large part of this will be reduced film production, a move Amy Pascal says will create “a more equitable balance between risk and reward.”

10) It probably won’t lead to Obamacare level criticism, but Barack Obama hasn’t made friends with some visual effects artists. After it was announced President Obama would visit DreamWorks Animation studio for a speech and visit with Jeffrey Katzenberg, visual effects artists at the company have planned to protest the visit due to the increased outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries.

And finally, two silly stories from a silly industry:

The Internet exploded this week when it was reported an “It’s A Wonderful Life” sequel was being planned. In a surprising twist (like in the movie!), Paramount announced it would fight any proposed sequel, claiming any project would require a license from the studio. With the film possibly dying a quick death, we will all have to ask an angel to show us a world where this sequel did, in fact, get released.

Mike “The Situation” “The Stupid Nickname” Sorrentino of Jersey Shore ‘fame’ is under federal investigation as the U.S. Attorney’s office has issued subpoenas for company records from businesses Sorrentino owns like MPS Entertainment and a clothing line. I would make a joke about this, but I don’t know enough about this ‘celebrity’ to say something witty.

Journalists and bloggers have lined up to peddle new conventional wisdom as to why, given all the time and effort employed to preach right-wing Republicanism all the time, the network seemingly failed as both an electoral strategy and as a news organization. Fox’s mission, they argue, was supposedly repudiated. They point to the failures of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who has featured too many kooks on his network for it to be taken seriously. They argue that Fox misinformed its viewers over the last four years—from its mad-cap conspiracy theories and outright lies to its closing campaign to push unrealistic fantasies of a Romney landslide. They point to the failures of the audience, which supposedly wants to be lied to, or wants to hear what it wants to hear. They point to the failures of Fox’s supposed electoral strategy of constant anti-Obama, anti-Democrats rhetoric, and thus, they contend, Fox must start over.

Perhaps some of those arguments have merit, but I tend to think they miss more important, better explanatory points. The failures of Fox is not about misinformation, for information is not the commodity it is selling. The failures aren’t about Ailes trying to get his guy elected, for there is no overall electoral strategy from which Ailes is working. And it’s not about making the audience comfortable by giving it the lies it wants to hear, because audiences don’t directly drive the specifics of content. Rather, Fox is fundamentally about two things that go together—community and money. Through the former, the latter arrives with ease.

The creation and sustaining of a community of viewers is one of the most important cable industry strategies of the post-network era, as I have argued elsewhere. Fox News has, by all accounts, created one of the most loyal audience communities, and done so largely through ideology. As numerous polls have shown, conservative viewers have found the place on TV where they call home.

Another, perhaps more helpful word for community, though, is tribe. Fox isn’t attractive to viewers because viewers have some overt affection for Dick Morris, Michelle Malkin, or Steve Doocy, or belief in the information (or vitriol) these commentators and hosts spout. Rather, those are just people found within the tribe. The tribe coheres, and its participants return, for other reasons.

Let’s look at the Chicago Cubs as an example. By all measure, the Cubs are losers. They haven’t won the World Series in over 100 years, and when post-season opportunity knocks, they are always sure to disappoint. What is more, there is a completely viable team that could be cheered instead—the recent World Series champs (2005), the White Sox—who live right across town, where the baseball fan can even find a ticket on any given day.

But Cubs fans come for something else. It is who they are; it’s where their peeps reside. And never mind that tickets are hard to come by, or that you have to sit on the roof of a house that isn’t even in the damn ballpark. To be a Cubs fan is to be at Wrigley Field and to be with other fellow Cub fans, irrespective of the manager’s strategy for winning, and irrespective of the fact that you rarely hear what you want to hear (e.g., the roar of the crowd). The same goes with conservatives and Fox News. Audiences come because this is their crowd and their team and their stadium. They lost this season, but 2010 was glorious.

What Fox is selling is a worldview that makes sense to its audience’s worldview. They aren’t selling information, because the audience didn’t come for that. Indeed, as Chan-Olmsted and Cha argue in the International Journal of Media Management, studies of cable news audiences suggest that the motivation to view in order to learn information is not a primary factor in people’s choice of cable news viewing.

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes

Neither is Fox in the business to convert voters in Wisconsin, Colorado, or Nevada. They are concerned with feeding their tribe in Alabama, Indiana, and Arizona. It’s about communion, a word that shares a central relationship to community and communication, as James Carey famously pointed out. These are communers who return day after day, week after week, and by doing so, leave their offering in the viewing plate.

News Corp didn’t just renew Roger Ailes contract before the election because they were confident he had brought or would bring them a victory. They did so because he makes them nearly a billion dollars in profits (40% of News Corps profits), a unit that is second only to the company’s film division for profitability. We might argue (as did Thomas Frank in 2004 concerning the electoral defeat of certain right-wing culture war initiatives) that failure is good for business. It sustains impatience, and given the network’s tendency to cast the viewer as protagonist in the struggle against evil liberals and the Kenyan Overlord, the viewer is, as Victor Turner once wrote, “overborn by duty” to keep tuning in, ever vigilant in defense of his or her core values that are under attack.

Perhaps the most prescient analysis of Fox News was made over a year ago, and unrelated to this election. Former Bush speechwriter and conservative columnist and blogger David Frum noted, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.” Literally, Fox has masterfully mined the fields of Republican politics for a cast of characters that make up the Fox team. Win or lose (preferably the latter, for then the Palins, Roves, and Huckabees are available for air time), they provide the talent and ideological perspective from which Fox crafts its programming around daily events and partisan struggles.

We make a mistake, I contend, in continuing to evaluate Fox’s place and role in American political culture through the lens of journalism (and its assumed information-seeking citizen-viewers), or even through the lens of politics. Fox News is about television and the assemblage of the largest audience it can muster. Like other reality shows that feature food or fashion or fishing, this one just happens to use politics for its performances.

It is in this regard that Frum gets it right—as the tribe comprised of the Republican politicians and Republican viewers engage in their ritual performances, they provide the (free) labor, while Fox simply coordinates, orchestrates, and performs its public demonstration of the tribe’s fight for survival. Unfortunately for Republicans, in this instance, another tribe has spoken.

But there was a second reason to celebrate for social scientists.  If Wednesday morning left both the electoral map and Republican politicians feeling a little blue, there was another occupational group in need of collective introspection: the class of political journalists, commentators and pundits, who in the cause of the campaign had increasingly wilfully disregarded the lessons of the academic disciplines that form journalism’s very foundation.

Obama’s victory was decisive, winning 332 votes in the Electoral College compared to Romney’s 206 (assuming Obama will hold his nearly 50,000 votes advantage in Florida). His margin in the popular vote will be around three million, taking eight out of the nine states news media had identified as swing states throughout the campaign. The clarity of this victory appeared to have been surprising to many. For months many news media had promised a nailbiter, talked of a race that was “too close to call.” Some predicted a Romney victory or even a Romney landslide, leaving Jed Levison to gleefully list 34 blown election predictions on Daily Kos. From Glen Beck to Newt Gingrich reviewing these predictions promises a great deal of liberal Schadenfreude, but they are unsurprising. They were attempts by individuals who had openly pinned their colors to the GOP mast to present the Republican ticket as competitive for obvious strategic reasons. And while I am aware of the dangers of taking Fox News blatant disregard of fundamental journalistic ethics in their entirely partisan perspective, few will disagree if I rank Fox News among these campaigners and lobbyists rather than among actual news media.

The denial of Republican activists and supporters upon learning of Obama’s victory which we could witness across Twitter and broadcast news alike the day after the election is as much an expression of the first stage of grief as it is of the fragmentation of the public sphere which has allowed audiences to construct textual boundaries in their engagement with news that limit the discourses they encounter to those that correspond with their own partisan perspective and horizons of expectation.

This crisis of public discourse is not a new insight. Yet, it is confounded by a failure of political journalism that includes the standards of many, though not all professional journalists. The most shocking aspect of the campaign coverage was that mainstream media’s staunch reluctance to indicate the way the race was leaning and developing. After the first debate between the candidates in Denver, the notion of “Mittmentum” captured the journalistic imagination. Predictions commonly identified all nine swing states as ‘toss up.’  As little as a week ago, the Washington Post moved Ohio back into this category. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, to the bewildered amusement of Obama supporters, continued calling polls showing the President leading by 2 or 3% a “statistical tie.” Right up to the election pundits from NPR to the BBC stressed how in such a close race any outcome was possible.

But was it? While the old hacks of the trait peddled the story of a “too close to call” election, those contributing to the debate from different professional backgrounds, often via the blogosphere, offered alternative ‑ and as it turns out far more accurate assessments ‑ of the state of the race. Nate Silver, economics graduate and baseball analysts, is only the most prominent exponents of the many who approached the polling data with the systematic approach that was not only absent among many political journalists, but that also proved entirely accurate.  On his blog Fivethirtyeight, licensed by the New York Times two years ago, Silver quantified the chances of an Obama re-election at 90.9% while many political journalists continued to resort to the old “toss up” line. In the end, Silver called every single of the fifty states correctly, including closely fought North Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Ohio. Other’s such as the Princeton Electoral Consortium, run by Sam Wang, neuroscientist and regular contributor to the BBC’s outstanding statistics radio program More or Less, were similarly accurate.

Ezra Klein summarized the backlash against Silver by political commentators and politicians Silver’s model suggested were loosing last week in the Washington Post. Now that his predictions have been proven highly accurate again, those who rushed to his defense before have plenty of cause to celebrate the triumph of maths. Anthony Goldbloom in the Sidney Morning Herald echoes many such reactions when he claims “the ability to analyze large amounts of data is starting to replace expert knowledge.”

It is tempting to agree with Goldbloom’s claims. Too often during the campaign was political journalism lacking in basic literacy and numeracy. My personal highlight in this respect came early on election night with CNN’s Gary Tuchman exemplifying political journalism’s crisis in just three words: trying to compare the handwritten returns from three polling stations in Virginia to the respective 2008 results, Tuchman concluded they are “almost exactly similar” – a phrase that in its tripart oxymoronic denial of numerical and linguistic logic is a multifaceted complex of stupidity and ignorance reminiscent of an Escher painting.

But it is a false dichotomy. This is not about data crunching Wunderkinder with degrees in economics, sociology or statistics whose computer-powered precision faces off with the gut and intuition of aging political journalists. While Silver’s model (whose code he understandably doesn’t disclose) appears to be remarkably accurate and he is to be congratulated on his remarkable achievements, it does not spell the redundancy of political journalists. It doesn’t prove the supremacy of statistics over other forms of analysis. Rather it calls for something else: better political journalism and a thorough reflection on what political journalism is for and how it ought to be conducted.

The accuracy of Silver’s predictions is not a triumph of maths and statistics, it is an illustration of the need to reflect on methods and epistemology. What much of political punditry over the past months failed to recognise are the basics of methodology that any student on our undergraduate courses in sociology or Media Studies will learn in their first year: there is no universally accurate method, and different research questions require different methods of study. If we are interested in question of “how many?” and “who?” (which tend to be fundamental to predicting election results), political commentator’s gut feeling or “having talked to the people here in Ohio” are a poor substitute for systematic analysis of different polls and polling average. And while no one asks for the bulk of political journalists to share the depth of statistical literacy that mark Silver’s or Wang’s work, asking about sampling strategies of different pollsters – who was being interviewed and by what means – is no prerogative of experts but are questions that our said undergraduates seem to have rather greater confidence in answering that many professional journalists across major networks and national newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The point is that it is not the job of political correspondents, pundits and commentators to sit around tables and predict elections in the same way that retired athletes get to make a living by speculating about the outcome of sporting competitions. They are, evidently, no good at it. Instead, we need commentators and journalists who understand the nature of evidence (be it statistical or otherwise) and focus on the questions they are better equipped to answer ‑ not the quantitative, but qualitative questions of the campaign: the “whys” and “hows”, not the “who” and “how manys.”

There are two possible explanations for their failure to do so, both of which I believe are contributing factors. Firstly, broadcasters have a double incentive for portraying a close race. Again, much like sporting contests that are billed as epic battles full of suspense and surprise, covering a closely fought presidential election is likely to attract higher ratings than a foregone electoral conclusion. Yet, even more importantly, portraying the contest as close is the premise for sustaining the enormous influx of revenue from campaigns buying airtime with donors on both sides being much less likely to contribute the cash that ultimately ends up in media organizations’ pockets if there appears little to play for. Someone like Nate Silver only spoils the party here.

Beyond this institutional failure, however, also lies a failure of journalistic integrity and competency on an individual level, as many professional journalists fail to approach their work in a systematic and indeed scientific fashion; a failure to question the empirical basis of their assumptions and conclusions and to engage with the plethora of information and knowledge from the academic community and other expert citizens that via the world wide web has become easily accessible to journalists and the general public alike. This failure is reflective of a disengaged, complacent and lazy attitude towards the nature of knowledge. I am not quite, like Judith Lichtenberg, raising the spectre of positivism here. But in face of a cultural and political movement that has appropriated the lessons of deconstructionism to set out to construct its own reality, political journalists have to learn that the old party trick of ‘balancing’ won’t do. Truth is not the mid-point between Karl Rove’s opinion and that of a morally sane person. Instead journalists need to take the real lesson from the accuracy of Silver’s predictions: not that numbers beat words, not that quantitative research is inherently superior to qualitative investigation, but that whatever type of knowledge and information we deal with, not least professionally, we need to critically examine its empirical and epistemological premises.  From election predictions to reporting on social deprivation, global warming, and a range of other topics in which journalists seem unable to penetrate the fog of political spin through an almost hysterical reluctance to engage with the science behind the claims, leaving them to simply recycle talking points and poorly understood statistics, it’s logic, not balance that matters. Now that the election is over, those who make a living from creating and distributing knowledge, information and evaluation, shouldn’t marvel at the “magic powers” of maths – they should appreciate the indispensable need to critically reflect on the processes by which they do so. As the godfather of political punditry James Carville himself would have said: “It’s methodology, stupid!”

Some of those failed Comedy Central shows have attempted to create comedy with a satiric edge more akin to Dave Chappelle than Tosh’s frat-boy humor. Unfortunately, those shows have done a lousy job of it, amounting to uninspired clones. Chocolate News was the “Black” Daily Show; of course, Mind of Mencia was the “Latino” Chappelle’s Show. But these exhibited none of Chappelle’s talent for comically exploiting audience anxieties about race and identity politics, which, it turns out, is more difficult than it looks. However outrageous his sketches might be (the first episode featured Clayton Bigsby, “Black White Supremacist”) Chappelle was doing some complicated cultural work, making meaningful comedy if not outright satire for an audience that was “post-PC” not because it dismissed identity politics, but had largely internalized them.

I’m not sure what the success of Tosh.0 tells us about the “post-PC” status of the Comedy Central audience—at least I can’t speculate on it right here at the moment. But I am anxious to continue to watch the latest program to follow Tosh.0, Key and Peele, which appears to be tentatively picking up the mantel of satiric sketch comedy that Chappelle abandoned, largely due to his concerns about what meanings audiences were making from it. But if the premiere episode of Key and Peele is any indication, it will do so in a much more restrained way. That premiere contained nothing so shocking as Chappelle’s Clayton Bigsby, and one reviewer, in fact, described the duo’s comedy as “genteel.”

What I thought was both interesting and funny about the show was how almost every segment centered on the performance of identity. When Key and Peele appeared onstage after the opening segment, they immediately told the audience they were both biracial, and made jokes based on the notion that they routinely “adjust our Blackness” depending on the company they are in. Although the first of these jokes was that they do this to terrify white people, the segment ended by suggesting that the “Blackest” performances occur when “white-sounding-black-guys” get together. Rather than keeping the focus on race, (and this is wise given the 18-34 male demo) most of the segments focused on the performance of masculinity. In the cold-open, the two “man/Black up” their phone conversations to save face in front of one another; in another, they recount to each other arguments with their wives or girlfriends, culminating in calling them “Bitch,” but always in supreme fear they will be caught doing so. A recurring bit in the show parodied Lil Wayne in prison, where he becomes very self-conscious about putting on his tough guy act.

For my money, the best segment of the show had actually been circulating on YouTube prior to the premiere, and already has an ancillary Twitter feed: #obamatranslated. That segment featured Peele doing a spot-on impression of Obama while Key serves as his “Anger Translator.” The lines for Peele’s Obama must have come verbatim from an assortment of his real comments, but Key’s impassioned and physically animated translations (such as shouting “I am not a Muslim” through a megaphone when the Tea Party is mentioned) served as the kind of catharsis, for me at least, that I’ve been wishing to get from a caricature of the president but no one (including Fred Armisen) has been able to get a good angle on Obama. It takes two, apparently.

Maybe Chappelle’s Show was a program for the Bush era, when it took something really significant to shock and it felt good when it did so. And maybe Key & Peele is a show for the Obama era, not because—like Obama—its stars are biracial or “genteel,” but because culture that intentionally shocks has become so mundane. The comforting reassurance of the sitcom has morphed into every episode Family Guy meeting its quota of “bad taste” by offending enough different “interest groups” that audiences are sure none of it can actually mean anything or matter to anyone. And however much South Park’s creators might like us to believe there’s a qualitative difference between the comic irreverence of Family Guy and South Park’s satire, I have to confess that what had once seemed to me an air of indignant outrage, now seems more like studied insouciance.

There are some things that should remain shocking. A congressman shouting “liar” at the president, for example. The suggestion that there is actually a “War on Christmas.” The fact that Mitt Romney is worth more money than the previous eight presidents combined. I hope Key & Peele choose to satirize this stuff, because I’ll be watching, and I hope some of the Tosh.0 crowd sticks around and does so, too.

When O’Reilly pressed for a list of things that Obama has done “wrong” in his first year, Stewart argues it is the poor job Obama has done of letting Congress (and the lobbyists who fund them) dominate the story. “It allows too much room for different narratives to take hold,” Stewart argues, “for instance, a narrative that might emanate from a news organization of this ilk.” Stewart is simply repeating what others are saying: that Obama has “lost control of his political narrative, his ability to define the story of his presidency on his own terms….Mr. Obama faces a narrative vacuum.”

These arguments about political narratives and the need for clear and simple stories deserve our attention. Jason Mittell has studied what he calls TV’s turn toward “narrative complexity” in the post-network era, especially in the realm of dramatic programming. But if Stewart is right here, news media, citizens, and even politicians seem incapable of dealing with narratives about politics that can adequately capture the complexity of those realities.

But must politics be reduced to simple narratives? How does one simplify that which is so complex? How does a news agency offer citizens a clear narrative, but one that doesn’t reduce the complexity of the situation? And who is the author of that narrative—the news channels or the politicians? Certainly Stewart is correct in noting that Fox and O’Reilly are masters of transforming complex social problems and the agents of government entrusted to address them into the most simple of good guy-bad guy, white hat-black hat tales (with the occasional conspiracy thrown in for the Birchers/Birthers crowd). And as O’Reilly notes, the market for such stories is alive and well (with Fox being ranked recently as the most trusted source of TV news).

But if Mittell is correct—that, by extension, substantial audiences do exist in this day and age for entertainment narratives that work outside such simple molds—where do we look for such similarly complex narratives about politics? Is The Daily Show and The Colbert Report the location for politics for those who enjoy the narratives on HBO (for there is nothing simple about parody and satire)? Or is Stewart simply a master at taking complexity in public life and boiling it down to nuggets of truths without pushing aside that complexity in the process (the way, say, that All in the Family did in a previous era)?

On the other hand, perhaps Stewart is wrong. Instead of a clear or simple narrative, perhaps Fox is actually presenting a very convoluted and complex one. Certainly the performance of ideology that Glenn Beck enacts on his blackboards or the conspiracy theory documentaries he produces are anything but simple (completely illogical is another thing). Perhaps the most simple of narratives about politics comes from CNN and the broadcast networks, with their presentist, “who’s up and who’s down today” narratives that blur the bigger picture of governance, makes politics into a farcical circus act, and treats “news” about politics as a series of penny dreadfuls.

Whichever way, the narrative complexity of entertainment television suggests that some citizen-viewers are capable of engaging with narratives that represent the complexities of social reality—much more so than the narratives we currently find in the realm of television news. Sadly, I don’t expect cable or broadcast news to embrace that complexity anytime soon. For viewers of my ideological ilk, fake news may have to suffice.

Obviously the terrible shape of the economy is on almost everyone’s mind. And it should come as no surprise that anger about our current condition would find its way to the ballot box. The political right has exploited that anger because, well, it makes for good politics (they have little else to sell) and attacking Obama also makes for profitable media. The political left, on the other hand, calls this “Obama’s inheritance”—that these are conditions that Obama did not create but inherited from eight years of Republican corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence (as the most recent conversation between Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank demonstrates).

The left, of course, has a point. The polity’s mood is directly related to the fact that Americans are notoriously ahistorical, not to mention ill-informed and contemptuous of politics. Given current conditions, it is simply easy to blame Obama and the Democrats for not turning things around more quickly—never mind that guy who was in charge 365 days ago.

What interests me more is what we see in the middle. What has grabbed my attention is how presentist our media is in their reporting. By presentist I mean the way in which news media are generally focused on explaining the now with little regard to what happened last month or last year (although I do enjoy the double entendre of the dictionary definition of presentist–“a person who maintains that the prophecies in the Apocalypse are now being fulfilled”). Even NPR is breathless in its “reporting” on how the public feels right this minute and connecting those feelings to Obama, with little attempt to frame its stories in the broader context of the slow processes of governance and economic change.

Political scientists say that the modern presidency is dominated by the “continuous campaign,” whereby campaigning for public office continues every day that one is in office. They bemoan the fact that the dynamics of campaigning destroys one’s ability to engage in the politics of governance. What political scientists often fail to recognize is the continuous campaign’s connection to our entertainment culture, and celebrity politics in particular.

Celebrity politics isn’t just about the selling of politicians such as Obama and Palin on the campaign trail (and the public’s affective relationship therewith). It is also the way in which news media treat governance in the same fashion that they treat celebrity culture. Who is up or down on any given day, as determined by the gods of popularity? Is the celebrity being worshiped or vilified by the public right now? News media, like celebrity itself, must sell its meaningfulness or relevance to the public every day, and aligning with popular sentiment becomes the basis for how reporting gets done. Looking backwards is only helpful in end-of-year specials. And describing the intricacies of how power works simply doesn’t sell like the red carpet spectacles featured in OK! magazine.

If the public is ahistorical and the press is damningly superficial in its role in framing or reporting reality (much less helping the public understand governance), then Obama best return to campaign mode soon, for the road ahead looks to be a particularly bumpy ride.