unfutz's charts show the rate of growth slackening considerably over the past couple of days -- an early warning sign of media scandal fatigue, I think.

I'm not sure I agree, or, rather, I think it's too early to tell.

First there's the methodological problem that it takes three or four days to get an accurate read on the number of Google News hits, so the slackening that Billmon sees may turn out to be somewhat less that it appears at the moment. Still, it's not going to go away completely even after the numbers are corrected.

More importantly, as Billmon also states, it really takes a specific news hook to get the kind of spikes in adds you can see on the 3rd the 8th and the 10th, and that hook can conceivably be nothing more than some high profile Democrat summarizing and reprising the charges against Bush, perhaps with an added twist. That might well be enough to spike things again. (One hopes that the Kerry campaign and the DNC are looking at graphs similar to mine -- or, at the very least, are relying on their intuitive sense of the ebb and flow of press coverage -- to gauge when the most opportune moment is for a renewed attack. My thought is that Tuesday might be a good day for it.)

Finally, as indicated by their behavior in the gaggle, the White House press corps (and the major media in general) smells blood and weakness in the Bush administration, which opens the door to the kind of journalistic pack behavior which keeps a story like this active and prevents it from dying. They haven't been that way in a while and now that they've tasted the thrill of it (they really seemed to enjoy browbeating Scott McClellan about the community service issue), they're unlikely to let it go so easily.

For these reasons, I'm not inclined to be as pessimistic as Billmon is about the trajectory of this story.

Postscript: Kos also thinks that the story may be on its "final legs."