Matt Taibbi: Campaign Journalism Is Back, More Evil Than '04

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted April 10, 2007.

You'll hear a lot in the next 20 months about which candidate has bony hands, who looks good in a parka -- but you won't hear anything about who voted for the bankruptcy bill and who didn't.

God help us, the 2008 presidential election is already here; they are already murdering huge forests in South America so that Jonathan Alter and Karen Tumulty can tell us what the latest Scripps/Howard poll says "voters believe the next president's haircut should look like." Hell is much too good for all of us ...

Mainly in an attempt to preserve my own tenuous grip on sanity, I made it through this past weekend without reading much coverage of the campaign. The election, after all, is nearly a full Martian year away, with a Super Bowl and two World Series still to play out in between -- which means that the "urgency" of breaking campaign news is now and will remain for at least a year an almost 100% media concoction.