The irony, however, is that neither cable nor the Internet pioneered the twenty-four-hour news cycle. For that, we can thank the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. In November 1979, Iranian revolutionaries overran the US embassy in Tehran, taking dozens of American personnel as hostages. The spectacle shocked Americans who saw it all happen nearly in real time. The Iranian hostage drama was something new, a story in between a war and a crisis: Vietnam was a slow-motion debacle that dragged on for a decade, while the Cuban missile crisis took place in two weeks, faster than television and
...more
