Response to Mordy and Prolification of Linguistic Memes

I wanted to respond at some length to Mordy's post on language and politics, as this (at least to me) is a tremendously interesting topic. Here's Mordy on the latest iteration of media and campaign copycatism-

"Before you congratulate Sean Comb for this brilliant piece of rhetoric, start to look around the internet. You'll begin to see the expression everywhere. Googling "heartbeat" and "Palin" together returns 45,100 hits on google. Adding "McCain" raises the number to 86,000. (Even "heartbeat" + "McCain" + "Palin" returns 30,100 hits.) As far as I know, the expression "heartbeat away" never so popularly had the dual meaning that it currently does before. That means that our vernacular now supports an entirely new use of a colloquelism - and fast enough that it's basically impossible to trace where it began."

The heartbeat phrase is a particularly interesting case of media parroting, as its clear that this meme began not with the Obama campaign itself but with a blogger (I'm pretty sure the phrase originates from this Ezra Klein post*, which came very soon after the Palin announcement from a blogger who I normally wouldn't expect to copy others) and gets picked up not only by the entire MSM but eventually by the Obama campaign as well. While I understand the urge to use and reuse such a clever little phrase, I can't help but cringe every time I hear it. This media mimesis is a perfect example of the type of groupthink that we all (especially bloggers, who many look to for unconventional wisdom) should be avoiding. The same disease that gives us "a heartbeat away from the presidency" 50 times a day (which I grant deals with an issue of some importance) gives us 3 networks discussing John Edwards' haircut and nightly newscasts devoting ten minutes to Barack Obama's bowling score.

*That is, the origin of the phrases use this election cycle.

Studying The Daily Show

Via The Atlantic: The Project for Excellence in Journalism examines The Daily Show, and surprise surprise, here are the some of the findings:

"The press itself is another significant focus on The Daily Show. In all, 8% of the time was made up of segments about the press and news media. That is more than double the amount of coverage of media in the mainstream press overall during the same period."

"Regular viewers of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report were most likely to score in the highest percentile on knowledge of current affairs."

Of course, the idea that Daily Show viewers are "stoned slackers" (as Bill O'reilly once referred to them) is refuted not only by my own observations (and self-observations), but also by the fact that political jokes require some prior knowledge of politics to enjoy, and judging by the average 1.8 million nightly viewers the show has (for comparison, CNN's highest rated show gets 1.2 million viewers), someone is enjoying it.