The YouTube Campaign

Here's a Frank Rich column claiming, among other things, the primacy of the internet -- specifically video clips -- in this election. Rich describes:

the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to
override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway
establishment ...
That Mrs. Clinton’s campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days
after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of
20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the
professionals around Mrs. Clinton — though surely knowing her story was false —
thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television
network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first lady’s
foreign trip — as the
CBS Evening News did on Monday night — and that this smoking gun would then
become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.
The Drudge
Report’s link to the YouTube iteration of the
CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a
third-place network news program’s nightly audience. It had more YouTube views
than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of
Britney Spears making her latest “comeback”
on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton,
backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of “sleep
deprivation” and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.

Let's go to the tape

Today's New York Times carried a story about a paradigm shift. The preference for having unedited video to look at and play with, alongside your news story.

“We’re talking about a generation that doesn’t just like seeing the video in addition to the story — they expect it,” said Danny Shea, 23, the associate media editor for The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com). “And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message.”

Slate magazine thought that was pretty obvious.

Back to the past: Yesterday, in a column that surveyed the way people get political information from the Internet, the WSJ's Lee Gomes went mid-'90s on his readers to talk (of all things) e-mail technology. The paper noted that e-mail is "an easy and effective way for people to share ideas with friends about what might be going on with the candidates." TP thought it couldn't get much worse than that, but then today's Page One (!) NYT story comes along, where Brian Stelter reveals that (brace yourselves here) people, and more specifically "younger voters," are "not just consumers of news ... but conduits as well." That means these young people send out stories and videos to their friends, who often share stuff as well so they all keep each other informed. "In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth." Exactly.

Election reporters cover elections

As the campaign rages on, the war in Iraq seems to be less of a story ...which may affect the election.

One Picture Is Worth ...

This is the picture that (cropped a little differently) adorned the New York Times front page the Thursday aftertheTexas/Ohio victores for Clinton.

Independent Ads

As we look at the role advertising plays, we'll be looking at the increasing importance of independent ads. Here's an early NPR piece that focuses on how they're funded.

The Tina Fey Factor

One of the remarkable developments in Feb/March was the Clinton campaign's turning to comedy shows, especially SNL, for leverage in shifting the tone of coverage and selling the meme that Obama was getting "a pass" on tough questions. Obama, after the March 4 primaries said he clearly needed to have a conversation with Tina Fey. Was this really what changed the coverage? Not everybody agreed.

When this article was posted on
Tuesday on The New York Times Web site, several readers said the news media had
been unfair to Mrs. Clinton. Many said reporters had not been tough enough on
her. Many also focused on the role of “Saturday Night Live.”
“The line
between politics and entertainment has become almost fatally blurred now, and I
am uncomfortable with that,” a reader wrote. “SNL is NOT journalism, and it’s a
sad statement that a late night comedy show might have a greater impact on our
political path than a debate.”
Another reader wrote: “Don’t kid yourselves,
the media didn’t suddenly have some revelation because of SNL. They are trying
to sink Obama to keep this race, which they seem to love more than life itself,
going. SNL just provided them a justification.”