There have been numerous diaries here on DK about how the hundreds of millions spent by Super PAC's and the campaigns this past election had so little influence on the outcome. It's not that they had no impact. In fact some of the money spent had a big influence on the outcome of individual races and certainly the Obama campaign's efforts to paint Romney as a out-of-touch predatory, venture capitalist worked, but overall the days of simply throwing a bunch of money at a national election and seeing a win seem to be behind us or at least on the wane. While it's fun to simply gloat about the other side wasting so much money for such an impotent result the question (at least for me) is, "Why?" So I got to Googling.

There are actually numerous articles devoted to changing trends in how Americans get their news. Starting in 2011 this topic started to get more coverage and some of the findings (at least on the surface) seem to have a correlation to the question I posed above.