Come the New Year, America plunges headlong into a whirlwind presidential primary and caucus calendar with wide-open races in both parties.

It may be the most exciting and volatile presidential election season in generations, all the more so given a new media landscape in which scandalous rumor can strike like lightning out of cyberspace, even skewing outcomes before charges are vetted or rebutted.

“It’s ‘Feeding Frenzy’ to the tenth power,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, referring to his influential 1991 book, which was subtitled “How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics.”

When it comes to scandal-mongering, Sabato said, the Internet is viral in every sense of the word. “It’s just taken what was a serious problem and turned it into the bubonic plague,” he said.

Salacious e-mails accusing candidates of every manner of misdeed arrive every day, Sabato said. The blogosphere is a perpetual wellspring of innuendo, and the mainstream press, desperate not to be left behind, finds itself ready to rationalize reporting on rumor.

“If it’s ‘out there,’ that’s enough excuse,” he said. ” ‘It’s affecting people’s votes,’ they say, and so it’s OK to go with it.”

Dhavan Shah, a professor of journalism and political science at the University of Wisconsin, sees the makings of a “perfect storm” that could play havoc with the nominating process. “It’s happening at such a pace that some of this information doesn’t have the normal filters of political journalism,” he said.

And Matthew Hindman, professor of information technology and politics at Arizona State University, said he “would bet large sums of money that there is going to be a scandal emerging in this election that would be discovered or disseminated first on a blog.” Hindman has written a book, tentatively titled “The Myth of Digital Democracy,” due out next fall.

In the long run, said Brown University political scientist Darrell West, the truth will out.

But the Iowa caucuses are Jan. 3; the New Hampshire primary is five days later. By Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, more than half the states will have voted.

“The trouble is in the short run, and we now have a very compressed nomination schedule where the short run is everything,” said West, author of “The Rise and Fall of the Media Establishment.”

In 2003, West, playing off Sabato’s coinage, wrote about “responsibility frenzies in news coverage” — occasions when the mainstream press refrained from covering the “salacious and tawdry.” But he thinks that kind of restraint is less likely now.

“Over the last decade we have seen the flourishing of the Internet and the rise of bloggers and nobody’s policing discourse anymore,” West said. “You can basically say anything you want.”

To many, of course, this freedom is not a problem but a great virtue.

“I think this kind of uh-oh-what-bad-could-happen story has been done a thousand times … and the world has not collapsed,” said Jeff Jarvis, who blogs about the media at Buzzmachine.com and is director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

“We’re not a nation of idiots. There are lot of gatekeepers and filters, among them the minds of the voters (if you don’t trust that, then hang up the Constitution).”

What’s more, Jarvis said, “You could talk about the rumors that get debunked quickly — more quickly than some media outlets print corrections.”

Indeed, Mickey Kaus, whose blog, Kausfiles, is on Slate.com, views the wild ride ahead as the surest path to the truth.

“Good investigative journalism depends on a little bit of mania,” Kaus said. “Sources have to be panicked to come forward.”

Kaus has been criticized for mentioning the specifics of scandal rumors on his site, but, as he said in a December exchange on Bloggingheads.TV with Robert Wright, only by posting one rumor did he learn to his satisfaction that it was unfounded. “You get feedback from your readers. The truth is found faster that way.”

And in a Nov. 1 post, Kaus relished rumors that a “potentially devastating sex scandal involving a leading presidential candidate” was in the offing, rumors he hoped would serve as a kind of “depth charge,” blowing every latent scandal public.

“Let all the scandals that lurk in the mud hatch out,” he continued. “I assume depth-charging will become a permanent feature of electoral politics.

“They tell me the Internet has changed things! Is there a problem? The true rumors will be confirmed and the phony rumors won’t be confirmed. But it will be harder to suppress the former. Isn’t the purpose of the primary campaigns to find out everything about the candidates before they are nominated?”

But political scientist Michael Cornfield believes the campaign schedule is the enemy of truth.

“In the short run, the rapid-response teams and journalistic fact-check operations can push back and be heard by the electorate,” Cornfield, author of “Politics Moves Online: Campaigning and the Internet,” wrote in an e-mail. “But I think the `short-run’ requires a week at least.”

Who knows? Everything is new. The campaign timetable. The fluid field, which includes groundbreaking candidates certain to engender fierce passions and resistance.

“We have a woman, a black, a Mormon and a Christian fundamentalist who are leading candidates,” said West. “There’s something to upset nearly everyone in America.”