Washington Post Reports on the Internet in Election ‘06: Uploading American Politics - washingtonpost.com
Raul Fernandez’s “Uploading American Politics” washingtonpost.com provides a quick snapshot on how the Internet has swept through the political landscape in only 12 years.
And while he captures the essence of the phenomenon, perhaps he is overstating some of it. Fernandez talks about how lots of political content was distributed over blogs, YouTube, and instant messengers “almost always without the candidates’ consent.”
Then he points to two examples, which I like to call the Burns and Allen show.
These examples are videos of defeated Senator Conrad Burns napping at an Ag hearing and defeated Senator George Allen’s infamous Macacca clip. Now while these two incumbents did not approve these messages, they were aware they were being videotaped.
But more importantly, these videos were posted on YouTube by the incumbents’ opponents. That’s right, these videos were deliberately distributed as part of Senators-elect Tester and Webb’s campaigns.
Now, this is really no different than putting these videos into TV campaign commercials… except that distributing them via YouTube is FREE!!! Not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So, while there was indeed lots of citizen uploading in the campaign of 2006, these two most prominent examples are just online variations of an old theme…negative advertising.
Apparently it works online, too.