As presidential campaigns become longer, the media’s appetite grows for comments by anyone who has a connection — no matter how close or remote — to candidates who are in the running for the highest office in the land. Extreme views are important for 24 hour cable news, the Internet, or political talk shows who need this stuff to stay in business. When people say or do things that have a “jaw-dropping” effect, it’s like a gift from the gods for media outlets trying to keep their advertisers happy by capturing a good share of the audience. It also means they have programming fodder for a minimum of 24 hours. If it’s a good sex scandal (see Bill Clinton or Eliot Spitzer) all the better! It means people will be tuning in with mixture of outrage, curiosity, and titillation. For lack of a better term, let’s call the Pavlovian behavior to these stories “The Tune In Factor,” or TIF. When you have a story with a high TIF, it may be a boon for TV/radio ratings, hits to a website, or newspaper sales, but it can quickly frame a political campaign in ways that the candidates don’t expect. If the story is to the candidate’s favor, they try and get the most mileage out of the story. But if it’s not, then they quickly rush to nullify the story’s negative effect. Sometimes, however, one can just sit back and collect political chits from a story that has no direct connection to a campaign.

This week’s TIF examples center on two hot button issues: 1. Race politics. 2. Sexuality — or more specifically, homosexuality. In the U.S., we love our right to free speech — until someone says something that we disagree with. That’s when our friends in the media jump in an exploit the level of disagreement in culture. Case in point: Barack Obama. Hillary’s camp has been rightfully slamming the media for their love affair with Obama. SNL did a skit on said love affair and suddenly stories on an indicted businessman giving Obama money surfaced (yet again). More importantly, there’s Obama’s pastor saying things in church about Hillary, about race, about 9/11, about the incarceration of blacks, about a lot of things that, because he’s Obama’s pastor, Obama must address. (more…)