All that hype

I remember when in November 2007, Ole Miss announced that we had been chosen as the host site for the first presidential debate. There was a lot of excitement, of course, and I believe we all remember people saying that this would be an unbelievable opportunity for Ole Miss to showcase itself to media. Then, it seemed that people scaled back their predictions on media coverage, and began to more sedately say that the media would come to Oxford, but focus on the debate. Predictions on how much the media would actually cover Ole Miss differed on a day-by-day and person-by-person basis.

Personally, I was not sure what to expect. I tried to have modest expectations on how much coverage Ole Miss would actually receive. But now that the debate has passed, I can now confidently say that Ole Miss received much more coverage than I initially thought. During the week of the debate, I did a Google alert of the word "Khayat." Every day, Google would email me a list of all news stories, blog entries etc. that were published that day that included the word "Khayat." Daily, stories about Ole Miss came in from news sites all over the world. And now, even after the debate, journalists are still interested in Ole Miss. On Friday, I and a few other students were interviewed by a New York Times journalist for a book she and her husband are writing about higher education. She also mentioned that she is looking into the marijuana research center on campus.

The debate, for all of its hype in the beginning, really didn't fail to live up to and surpass my expectations.