Campaign killers? Net skulduggery and political ads.

A quick programming update before I hop the next train back to Washington. Wednesday night, after the no doubt farcical exchanges of the Republican YouTube debates, CNN will actually air a program I'm interested in for once. Entitled "Campaign Killers", the show is a part of CNN's Broken Government series. This particular episode deals with negative campaigning and its effect on the American political process. While I'm not exactly sure what bases they'll cover over the course of an hour, a press release from earlier this month promises some interesting coverage:

The documentary examines political mudslinging, the history of negative advertisements and the role of the Internet as a viral weapon in politics today.

Nice to hear the Internet mentioned in the same breath with important political discourse that doesn't primarily involve fundraising. One of the most interesting media developments in the last couple of election cycles has been the ease with which individual citizen can personally affect a candidate's campaign. Before this, voicing your opinion required organization; even as late as the 2004 presidential election, the major sources of ads and media, outside of the campaigns themselves, were PACs and other interest groups. Now, anyone who has access to a camera and an opinion can, with a little talent, a few well-placed connections, and some luck, produce a video that can garner national attention over night. While this kind of impact seems like a logical step towards greater political freedom, it remains to be seen how the candidates and their campaigns can exploit this new communication tool.


Sadly, the good old days.

One obvious double-edged sword in all of this is the potential for responsibility-free negative campaigning. Traditionally, campaign ads have an easily-traceable origin point. While people can debate the intentions and validity of groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, they remain an identifiable group. Placing the advertising online at sites like YouTube makes that kind of background check almost impossible. Candidates could, conceivably, run a proxy smear campaign online with much less chance of immediate repercussions than they could using the Internet's broadcast-style predecessors. Though the people have more power, they also have a higher chance of attracting focused manipulation on the part of the candidates.


How do we deal with this?

Or this?

The political world has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to internet campaigning. At worst, the focus on user-generated campaign materials signals a potential excuse for laziness on the part of the political strategists. After all, why would they spend valuable campaign dollars on internet marketing when we have supporters who will do a decent job for free? However, that kind of attitude risks ignoring the innovations possible when investment dollars and talented minds collide. So far, this election has shown that the internet isn't going away. Whether or not a candidate can exploit the true potential of internet organizing and advertising in the next 12 months, however, remains to be seen.

That said, have a personal question about negative campaigning: why are the Democrats so bad at it, especially in the general election? My friend Lisa and I talked about this last week, and we couldn't figure it out. During the primaries, the knives come out, and the vitriol spews. Just ask Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards. Once the nomination is sewn up, though, a strange thing happens: everyone becomes nice. All of the anger and frustration that the candidates aimed at each other disappears once the real opponent enters the room. What's the deal? Is it a moral highroad issue? Are Republicans just meaner? What's behind the Democrats' lack of teeth when it comes to advertising?

Your opinions are, as always, welcome.

EVENT REVIEW: The American Forum, 11/14/2007

Last night, I attended a taping of The American Forum, a panel discussion series hosted by American University's School of Communications. Entitled From Grassroots to Netroots: The Impact of the Internet and Other Media on Politics, the program featured a panel made up of, among others, Josh McConaha and Cyrus Krohn (the e-campaign directors for the DNC and the RNC, respectively), as well as Adam Green (the campaign director of MoveOn.org). For anyone interested in hearing the program for themselves, it's available online right here, and broadcast on Sunday evening at 6pm on WAMU (88.5 FM).

For those of you who're too lazy for radio, here are a few of the key points brought up during the program:

- When asked to comment on the success of online campaigning, many people on the panel were quick to point out all of the great things being done with politics on the internet. Cyrus Krohn, however, gave a more realistic assessment: when it comes to the effectiveness of internet campaigning, it's still too soon to tell. He mentioned the ebb and flow of site popularity, and the fact that we still don't have enough net-mediated elections under our collective belts to begin drawing serious patterns. With all of the techno-utopianism that accompanies a program like the one I'm in, it's always nice to hear someone admit that, really, we're still not exactly sure what we're doing.

- Later in the panel, Krohn had his feathers ruffled by Adam Green's comments regarding MoveOn's lack of a right-wing equivalent. Green's argument was that, while progressive causes like the ones championed by MoveOn tend to lend themselves well to grassroots organization, the right tends to support causes better suited to what he referred to as a top-down "culture of disempowerment" that favors interests and politicians over voters. Though Krohn offered some interesting thoughts on MoveOn's Petraeus ad, I felt that the real counter-example came from Dottie Lynch, who pointed out the internet's role in organizing the Harriet Myers backlash from a few years ago. She noted that, while it may not be considered grassroots, the Republican presence on the internet is still a powerful one.

Also, as someone in my group pointed out, it's ironic that Green would criticize the Republicans for lacking bottom-up, grassroots chops. For all of its plays towards citizen activism, MoveOn is primarily run through ordered, top-down direction.

- I was also glad to hear someone bring up 10Questions.com and their recent success regarding Barack Obama and net neutrality policy. For anyone interested in the site, check it out. It really might be the antidote to those dog and pony shows that are the YouTube debates. Also, for anyone interested in Barack Obama's stance on net neutrality and other technological matters, check out this question and answer session from Wednesday evening.



- Finally, the panel also had some interesting views on the viral video phenomenon that I touched on last week. Most of the panelists were split when it came to deciding if these easily-disseminated, unscripted moments were good or bad for the political landscape. Jeanne Cumming claimed that the threat of embarrassment would cause candidates to stick to the official message more, rendering them lifeless, while Green claimed that this new form of citizen journalism would lead to a "cleansing of the idiots", weeding out the slow and uninformed. Cummings also brought up an interesting point: in the case of viral videos, the subject matter is always negative. Why do you suppose that is? Why don't videos of Barack Obama helping old ladies across the street or Mitt Romney getting cats out of trees make the rounds on YouTube? Are we just not interested?

Anyway, that's your preview. To hear the panels opinion on the youth vote, the internet's role in local organizing, user-generated mudslinging, and more, tune in.

Boing Boing makes you think about the internet

For those of you that don't while away your hours over at Boing Boing, here are a couple of interesting stories that merit discussion at a more appropriate hour.

In the first, anti-blogger and technology critic Andrew Keen receives a dressing down at the hands of Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga over some of the statements made in Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur. Now, it's not the argument that interests me: clearly, based on the examples Zuniga offers, Keen wasn't exactly careful in his research (at least in terms of Zuniga's biography). However, Keen's reaction to Web 2.0 catches my attention. Is there any chance he's right? Are we all just communists pecking away at the established order to the ruination of everything? Should we all just shut up and trust the professionals to do their jobs? I think you might have an idea which way I'm leaning, but I'll elucidate more tomorrow.

Closely tied to this topic is Barack Obama's recent promise to support efforts to pass Net Neutrality laws if he's elected president. Given some of the tech talk that we get from politicians, it's nice to see a high profile candidate actually engage an issue from a relatively well-informed vantage point. Keeping the Internet free of corporate pricing packages and usage restrictions is key to the survival of online discourse as we know it. Between Obama's support for Net Neutrality and Chris Dodd's vow not to budge on telecom immunity shows that at least some people are paying attention. But what does this all mean for users? I have some thoughts, but they'll be up, alongside my review of the Romney campaign's YouTube channel, in the morning. Until then, I'll leave you with this: a potential vision of the future.



Image lifted from Something Awful by way of Boing Boing. Look here for the original article, or poke around here for more on Boing Boing's coverage of the debate.

FEMA, wildfires, and fake news. Oh my.

Just when you think that it might be time to remove the "much-maligned" moniker from in front of any and all references to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), something like this happens:




On Tuesday, FEMA held what was called a "news briefing" on the California fires, but the questions asked did not come from reporters. They were asked instead by FEMA staffers.

Apparently, the FEMA briefing was called with little lead-time and reporters didn't get there fast enough. Instead of acknowledging that reporters were not there they apparently pretended and even used the typical practice of calling a "last question."

The briefer, FEMA's Deputy Administrator Harvey Johnson, did not indicate that the questions were coming from staff who were in essence playing reporters. Six questions were asked and the phrasing and subject matter were not typical for a news briefing give and take.

And, just like that, all of the good feelings generated by the agency's admittedly-capable handling of the California wildfires gets sucked down the drain because some PR guy thinks he's smarter than the Internet. I mean, honestly: how did anyone think that this was a) a good idea and b) something that no one would notice, point out, and ridicule? I mean, sure, the public loves fake news, but not when it comes from respectable sources with a potentially vested interest in skewing the results. It's amazing, really. This is exactly the kind of thing that bloggers love to pounce on. Could a trained professional really not see this coming? Plus, where's the harm in disclosure? Admitting that the questions came from staffers filling in for reporters would've been far less embarrassing than getting caught faking the news without any regard for public interest.

If anything, this whole situation puts a spotlight on our collective media literacy. If you didn't think you had to be careful about your sources before, here's all the proof you need. Looking behind the curtain during these kinds of gaffes is interesting, because they're easy to spot. But how much of this kind of manipulation and/or incompetence floats by unnoticed? If you'd seen the video last Tuesday, would you have noticed something was up?

Though the damage has been done, the response by FEMA and the White House has been satisfactory, I guess. FEMA fired Pat Philbin, the PR guy who was responsible for the conference and was set to take over PR duties for the director of national intelligence (oh, the irony). The White House, bastion of media liberty that it is, lightly condemned the conference, noting that "it is not a practice that we would employ here". Wow. When the Bush Administration thinks you've gone to far, how must that make you feel?

The Pinocchio Test

The ethics of political persuasion is a business of fine lines and stretched truths. Whenever I tell people that I'm majoring in political communication, the general response involves lots of knowing "aaaaaaah"s followed by some form of the phrase "you're going to be a spin doctor!" While this outcome isn't a forgone, or even desirable, conclusion, it's the first thing most people think of when they hear about someone trying to craft and mediate political messages. Alongside "rhetoric", "spin" may be one of the most villified terms in the political world.


This is not my job.

With all of this in mind, I'm glad to see that some people out there are helping popularize the other function of an education in political communication: the ability to debunk your opponent (or, in this case, all of the candidates at once). This is the aim of the washingtonpost.com's Fact Checker service. Intended to "shed as much light as possible on controversial claims and counter-claims involving important national issues and the records of the various presidential candidates", the site offers in-depth breakdowns of candidate claims and advertising, along with relevant outside information that the original sources neglected to mention. In the end, each story is graded using the "Pinocchio Scale", a ranking system designed to guage just how big of a fib the original sources were offering.

While readers should come for the commentary (which includes a point-by-point examination of the MoveOn.org ad covered on this very blog a couple of weeks ago), they should stay for the chance to get in on the action themselves. The traditional investigative journalism on the site is augmented by a blog-style push for collaboration. As the group's mission statement notes -

We rely on our readers to send us suggestions on topics to fact check and tips on erroneous claims by political candidates, interest groups, and the media. Once we have posted an item on a subject, we invite your comments and contributions. If you have facts or documents that shed more light on the subject under discussion, or if you think we have made a mistake, let us know. We also want to make sure that the authors of questionable claims have ample opportunity to argue their case. We plan to issue our own opinion on factual disputes (see Pinocchio Test below), but it can be revised and updated when fresh evidence emerges.

Suddenly, the public has control of media watchdog powers and, what's more, they don't even have to go to the trouble of creating their own blog as a vehicle for sharing their ideas. The site not only acts as a clearinghouse for political advertising, but it does so through the collective efforts of journalists working in tandem with anonymous citizen researchers. As I said last week, the Washington Post seems to grasp the concepts of Web 2.0 better than some of their counterparts, and this lends further credence to that idea. Whether or not that translates into a major shift in media practices, or whether or not enough people are paying attention to make a difference, remains to be seen.