Media critic Dan Kennedy reviews the political press of the 2004 campaign
Dan Kennedy is a media critic at freekly newspaper Boston Phoenix whose work I admire greatly, even though he is ideologically way far to the left of me. On November 3 he gave a lecture at Northeastern University in Boston about “The Media, the Internet, and the 2004 Presidential Campaign.” I don’t agree with all of it, but his is an interesting summary of how media covered some aspects of the 2004 presidential campaign.
Below are some excerpts, but you really should consider reading the whole darn piece.
Kennedy on Kerry in the media:
[W]hen voters watched Kerry accept the Democratic nomination, at least half of them liked what they saw. And when they watched the debates, a significant plurality believed he had bested Bush. Yet in between, during a period when the campaign was entirely in the hands of the media, Kerry’s standing slipped markedly. What does this mean?
Kennedy on the Internet and the election campaigns:
[T]his was supposed to be the campaign in which the Internet changed everything. A lot of smart people believed this, and they looked to Howard Dean’s campaign as a model for how everything was now utterly different. In fact, Dean and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, did some brilliant things with the Internet. They raised a ton of money, they empowered Dean supporters by letting them post messages and organize events without adult supervision, and they used MeetUp technology to build early enthusiasm.
In fact, though, the Dean campaign’s technological innovations obscured what was really going on. The truth is that Dean’s strong antiwar stance, fiscal conservatism, and outsider message were exactly the sorts of things that would appeal to young, technologically savvy, well-educated people who spend a lot of time on the Internet. It wasn’t so much that Dean used the Internet as it was that heavy Internet users found him. These days, the vast majority of Americans are online, but only a tiny handful of them live online. For most of us, it’s just a tool — though an amazingly powerful tool.
When the Iowa caucuses finally arrived, polling by the Associated press showed that Kerry actually got more votes than Dean from people who had used the Internet “a great deal” to obtain news and information about the candidates. The tally was Kerry, 31 percent, and Dean, 25 percent. And this was before “The Scream.” The media’s repetitive coverage of “The Scream” has been justly criticized, but let’s not forget that Dean’s campaign was already in the midst of a meltdown. What the media really missed was that Howard Dean was never the frontrunner; rather, he put together the best celebrity candidacy during that period of time when absolutely no one other than a few political junkies were paying attention. And the Internet was one of the ways he did that.
Kennedy about bloggers and their impact:
…the notion that the bloggers have taken over the universe is ridiculous.
Kennedy is surely right about that, but I think he overplays the downplaying of web-based opinion making:
Slate and Salon are wonderful examples of websites that cover politics, but they would be just as wonderful if they were in print rather than online. The best of the bloggers — Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan, and Danny Schechter come to mind — are traditional journalists who’ve simply transferred their skills to a new medium.
Right, but had they not been on the Internet, a lot fewer people would read them and their importance would have been greatly diminished (who’s Danny Schechter, anyway?). Also, the way they argue and the importance they assign to various issues have been probably been significantly influenced by reader interaction, trackbacks, and stories pushed by other blogger.
CBS’s phony documents were exposed more quickly because of bloggers, but does anything really think they wouldn’t have come to light without Little Green Footballs? If that is the case, how on earth were Janet Cooke, Patricia Smith, and Mike Barnicle ever exposed as the frauds they were?
Yes, but it took weeks, months and years to bring those journalistic miscreants to heel. Having Dan Rather’s forgery-based reporting exposed in, say, February 2005 wouldn’t have been very helpful to President George W, Bush, would it? The Blogosphere is unique in the way it can quickly marshall vast ad-hoc resources to pursue, publish, and publicly vet stories.
