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Romney Regrets & The Media’s ‘Succession’ Problem

A blunt retrospective with Peter Hamby about partisan myopia, Twitter echo chambers, and the most underrated political narratives heading into 2024.

Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney in 2012. The ’12 campaign was the first race in which social media overtook print newspapers, TV news, and even traditional websites for members of the political press. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Image
Theodore Schleifer
December 20, 2022

Back in 2013, my Puck partner Peter Hamby published a seminal study for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center that posited, in short, that social media had killed the “boys on the bus”—shorthand for the sort of old-school, ink-stained pack journalism as documented in Timothy Crouse’s seminal book of the same name. At the time, the media industry in general, and the legacy press corps in particular, was only beginning to grapple with the fallout of the 2012 election—the first presidential race in which Twitter wasn’t just a factor, but a virtual protagonist, itself.