Endless campaigns drive media profits

Whatever the election's outcome, millions of Americans will wake up Nov 5 breathing a sigh of relief that the campaign is finally over. Only they'll be wrong. We now live in an age of the endless election, the perpetual campaign -- one fed by media outlets on all sides, whose success in the run-up to the 2008 vote has only whetted their collective appetite to keep the good times (and the attendant vitriol) rolling. This idea of politics as eternal combat -- with elections merely serving as exclamation points -- isn't exactly new. Sen Barack Obama recognized as much, telling the New York Times, "There is an entire industry now, an entire apparatus, designed to perpetuate this cultural schism, and it's powerful." Profitable, too.