A couple years ago, I speculated on whether or not Bill Clinton could have been elected if there had been a blogosphere in 1992. I called him an MSM president.
Now Chuck Todd says that he has been done in by new media (specifically, Youtube):
Although Clinton caught a glimpse of the digital future when he was president and a little-known Internet gadfly named Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, he was never subjected to the kind of unblinking scrutiny of today's media environment.
When Clinton was running for president, Todd said, he and his fellow candidates could misspeak -- and even willfully obfuscate -- with relative impunity.
"It was like a Jedi mind trick with him," he added. "It would take a few days for the media to catch up [and] by then he had moved on."
Well, it was a Jedi mind trick that never worked with me. Or in fact, not even a majority, since he could never win a majority. But he always had the press on his side, at least until their new love from Chicago came along.
[Via Virginia Postrel, who is, happily, currently cancer free]
What's the grammatical term for phrases like "unblinking stare"? It's not an idiom ...
Well, regardless, it's wrong. What we really have today is an unblinkered stare. And an unsilent voice.
While perhaps not a full-fledged idiom it is at least an idiomatic expression in the sense that it conveys a special meaning beyond the words themselves (in this case: ceaseless unfaltering scrutiny). Why do you think "unblinkered" is correct? Have you ever "blinkered" your eyes? I think you're only meant to use that kind of language in captions on funny pictures of cute & weird animals ^_^ (but I "has" problems with proper use of has/have so I shouldn't really say anything, and the occasional Norwenglishism too...).