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The Web as Political Weapon
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Oct 06, 2006 04:56 PM
from the crafty-netizens dept.
from the crafty-netizens dept.
cultrhetor writes "John Harris of the Washington Post has noticed that the three largest recent political controversies have stemmed from work done by digital inhabitants. In the article, New Media a Weapon in the New World of Politics, he notes the connections between the recent scandals involving Mark Foley, George Allen, and Bill Clinton were representative of the new, web-driven age of American politics." From the article: "Each originally percolated in the world of new media — Web sites and news outlets that did not exist a generation ago — before charging into the traditional world of newspapers and television networks. In each case, the accusations quickly pivoted into a debate about the motivations and alleged biases of the accusers. Cumulatively, the stories highlight a new brand of politics in which nearly any revelation in the news becomes a weapon or shield in the daily partisan wars, and the aim of candidates and their operatives is not so much to win an argument as to brand opponents as fundamentally unfit."
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A matter of time... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is new I believe is that we now have a critical mass or a critical number of participants present on the Internet. I hate to say it, because I loathe the term, but what John Harris (author of the Washington Post article) has discovered is "Internet 2.0", or the evolution and delivery of many of the promises that the Internet originally offered. And, like any tool, those that have been around for a while knew that the Internet can and will be used as both tools for good and as a weapon for selfish, self-aggrandizing acts, subversion and propaganda.
It was only a matter of time...
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A matter of time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this comment funny in the context of the article. Look at any politically-oriented blog. They all spend half their time bitching about shitty, biased reporting in the "MSM", and the other half of their time breathlessly quoting whatever paper they just trashed, because that paper happened to write an article which flatters their prejudices.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Letters to the editor won't appear until the next day, but what I'm saying right now, will crop up in a couple of seconds(once slashcode's done with it)
Hello? Paging Mr. Harris... (Score:4, Interesting)
Harris and Halperin have been running around the big news shows saying that Drudge is "The New Walter Cronkite". Give me an effin' break. Drudge is the guy who's been saying that the real criminals in this Foley scandal are those demonic teenagers who "baited" Foley into asking them to measure their hogs and send him pictures. Excuse me, but no amount of "baiting" is going to get me to ask somebody to send me a picture of their apparatus. Most people I know aren't going to be "baited" into becoming sexual predators.
So Harris and Halperin are saying that "Gee, the news media really is so liberal that the only answer is to make sure that every single story is as "fair" and "balanced" as possible. To them, this means that if you have Republicans taking millions of dollars from Jack Abramoff in order to change their votes on the floor of Congress, you also have to point out that Democrats took $184.35 from Abramoff's next door neighbor and pretend that their equal.
Really, there comes a time when a government is so out of hand that the last thing you want is a news media that's trying its best not to offend anyone, while at the same time you've got douchebags like Hannity and Limbaugh telling people that "Liberals Must Die".
Fact is, Harris and Halperin, as top representatives of a media structure that has failed to make a peep while an insane Administration is sending young Americans off to die in order to make the President and VP feel like they've got big dicks OUGHT to go down the tubes. They OUGHT to be ashamed of themselves, but not for being liberal, but for being stenographers in a period of American History when we sorely needed some voices of outrage.
Oh, and "Sgt Doom"... if you think you're getting more "factual" news from Fox than you do from the New York times, you've really got to lay off huffing cleaning fluid. It's messing with you, dude.
Parent
Re:A matter of time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Mod parent up! (Score:4, Insightful)
Limbaugh runs a radio show. A RADIO show. People might want to look up "Tokyo Rose" from 60 years ago.
The "change" isn't to a "new media".
The real change is that the existing media (newspapers, TV and radio) have abandoned most of the investigative reporting.
Now they just sit back and report on the "story" that website X is getting a lot of hits from a posting about a video clip about some politician you've never heard of.
The "old media" is "reporting" on what the current buzz is. That's all.
Parent
Re:Mod parent up! (Score:5, Insightful)
People seem to have forgotten that that it is perfectly possible to arrive at a conclusion favoring one side of an argument without any bias at all. Bias is not something you deduce by saying, "Whichever side this person supports is the side he's biased toward." Bias is affects the way you look at evidence and evaluate.
But no, everyone except Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Keith Olbermann seems to have forgotten that there do not exist two equally-valid, logical sides to every argument, both sides of an argument do not always deserve equal consideration and in short, sometimes one side is just right, and the other is just wrong.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As an aging male nerd, I feel discriminated against; I guess a career in politics is out for me.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a hypothetical example, and the news program itself is ultimately irrelevant to my point. Would you prefer 20/20? Okay... 20/20 it is.
I wouldn't put it that way (Score:3, Interesting)
Note well: By "tbe truth" I don't mean "the truth about someone's character", but rather "the truth about an event" or some such. That is, if someone said or did something, ever, in any context, there's probably someone who can find out about it on the net.
So what's really going on is that the Internet has turned the truth about peo
Re: (Score:2)
What sho
No fair! (Score:2)
The old media complaint about this?
"Hey, No fair! That's our job!"
What the ... ? (Score:2)
Two of those three "examples" happened on television. During regular news programming.
How is this "new media"?
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I'll disagree with that. (Score:2)
Sure it would have. We used to see that all the time in newspapers and on television and the radio. A local group does some digging and finds something and it becomes a nation-wide sensation.
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Because if it wasn't for the web, these videos would have been swept under the rug rather quickley and we wouldn't have been able to posts links on blogs to youtube.
Remember, most kids these days get their news from the Dailyshow or not at all.
Clinton scandal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Clinton scandal? Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
he notes the connections between the recent scandals involving Mark Foley, George Allen, and Bill Clinton were representative of the new, web-driven age of American politics."
What scandal? Oh, you mean this? "Former president Bill Clinton had a televised temper fit when an interviewer challenged his terrorism record."
"Temper fit" is a "scandal"? The interviewer provoked it by repeating the Bush administration rhetoric that he was "weak" on terrorism. Given that Bush brushed aside reports with titles like "Al-Qaeda to attack US targets in the coming months" and Rice was REPEATEDLY warned about the threat Al-Qaeda represented and yet did nothing...yeah, I think Clinton has a right to be pretty pissed at mindless rhetoric.
He raised his voice, came out of his chair a bit, and controlled the conversation long enough to cover the facts: a)yeah, he missed Bin Laden and he regrets it but b)he did more than Bush ever did.
Bush and his staff ignored patently obvious and repetitive evidence of an impending terrorist attack, declared Bin Laden his number one target and then a year later, suddenly told everyone it really wasn't actually all THAT important to get Bin Laden. Who, I might remind everyone, is still alive five years after "that fateful day".
Bush has had a trillion dollars, two military campaigns, a dozen or more grossly unconsitutional laws/acts and five years to fix things, and the only thing he's done is paint a giant target on the US by acting like a treaty-ripping baffoon on the stage of world politics and invading sovereign nations where there is a substantial number of people who belong to a religion which spawns aggressive, violent groups at the drop of a hat. Just you watch- he's about to do it again in a few months when North Korea goes "nuclear", and we'll be lucky if it doesn't destabilize the whole region by dragging China, Japan, and of course South Korea...then Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia...and all their corresponding allies (Britain, France, Australia, etc)- into World War 3.
Re:Clinton scandal? Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, it's that balance thing again. You see, if someone points out that all the recent scandals pertain to Republicans, someone's bound to come out complaining about 'bashing' and how the Dems seem to get a free ride from the 'Liberal' media.
No need to consider the real reasons why all the scandals these days are Republican scandals. I mean, no one really wants to admit that when one party takes advantage of the other's incompetence and timidity and runs roughshod over it in the elections, that party tends to pretty much do as it likes in office. And it gets away with bloody murder unless the opposition and the media finally grow a pair and start asking questions, which they don't. Years pass and the incumbents have started taking their privileged place at the trough for granted, which make them lazy and careless. This carelessness leads to some really stupid scandals, which finally tip the balance and let the other party take its place at the trough and complete the cycle.
Nobody wants to talk about that, because if the citizens of a nation were to come to believe this, they'd probably have to revolt. And nobody wants that, the citizens included.
Parent
False equivalence at work, again (Score:5, Interesting)
In this case, the Clinton scandal was really the Clinton-haters lying (yet again). But that's beside the point.
What this is is the typical example of balance
1. Show a major Republican gaffe
2. Show a minor Democratic gaffe
3. Claim that both parties are guilty, so neither has the moral high ground.
4. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
What planet are you from? (Score:3, Insightful)
He did refute the facts. He blew up at the interviewer after the interviewer pestered him for a few minutes. It was almost as if the interviewer *wanted* him to fly off the handle. Hell, the interviewer would hardly let him get a word in edgewise.
And for your information: according to Richard Clarke (Clinton's "Terrorist Czar") and other members of the Clinton cabinet, Clinton had set up a substantial, feasible
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Clinton wasn't weak on terror. Clinton's government actually prevented at least one 9/11 attack from happening on American soil, the attack on LAX on New Year's Eve, 1999.
Clinton didn't leave Bush a nation "unprepared" for an inevitable attack. Bush's first actions on taking over were to disma