PPP-100 Press, Politics, and Public Policy

PPP-100 Press, Politics, and Public Policy

Professor Alex Jones

Paper #2

How the Internet has

Changed Political Coverage

By Alison Thompson

May 5, 2004

How the Internet has Changed Political Coverage

Information and connectivity fuel democracy…so the more that people have of each, the easier participation becomes. Time Magazine, May 2004

Introduction

The Internet is changing political coverage by changing campaigns. Politics is about grassroots efforts, especially Democratic politics, and the Internet directly empowers the grassroots. It opens up campaigns to volunteer suggestions and activities; it gives the power of the campaign to the volunteers who actually run the campaign with very little guidance from the top. This differs from the primarily Republican hierarchical model, which tries to control the message; does not allow unmoderated blogging; and does not use the Meetup method because it disallows control of the volunteers.

The political internet and the government in general are about expressing your voice. Now the Internet lets you do that, through blogs, Meetups, and interactivity. The Internet is about democracy. The Dean campaign harnessed these tools at the presidential level – this paper will largely focus on the Dean campaign as an example of the new Internet-based politics. Many supporters signed on with Dean because they felt heard through his campaign. The alternative for voters who did not feel heard is Ralph Nader:

“What made Ralph run? …For the first time in his experience, Nader found himself ignored thoroughly by a Democratic administration. Nader and Clinton did not meet a single time in the course of eight years…. Al Gore also turned a cold shoulder…. As for the Clinton-era Congress, Nader found that he was a pariah, even among the most liberal members.... The doors were shut, tighter than ever. As he did during the Reagan years, Nader went to the grassroots, but there were limits to what could be accomplished. Nader wanted to have a say on weighty national issues. But more than ever before, he found it hard to get any political traction. [1]

In other words, Nader ran in 2000 (and 2004) because he felt he had lost his political voice. Many “disaffected Democrats” feel the same – they made up a large percentage of Dean’s supporters. The Internet provides their voice.

Ralph Nader acknowledged[2] that the Dean campaign had accomplished via the Internet Nader’s long-standing goal of “civic participation” and “participatory politics.” Maybe in the new era of Internet-based political coverage Nader will re-find a voice.

The lesson of the 2004 campaign is that it changed political coverage in ways people didn’t expect. It’s a wrong assumption that the Internet is the new TV. TV is a passive medium. Internet is not passive. Its real use is doing grassroots basics such as raising money, recruiting volunteers, and mobilizing the volunteer base. Dean is similar to JFK in that JFK made TV work for the campaign and then everyone copied this as a staple of campaigning. Dean did the same thing, used the Internet as a campaign tool. [3]

In this paper we’ll cite Meetups, blogs, and interactive website tools as the methods for Internet grassroots press, and compare with traditional media. I interviewed six people: three from traditional media, two from the political Internet, and one from academia of the political Internet.[4]

Interactivity and information on-line

Grassroots and Internet News

One of the primary issues is that political websites often are not written by professional reporters and editors, nor is the information verified. On the other hand, the mainstream press can be viewed as censoring – and often is viewed that way, by the Internet press (i.e., people who post on political websites). The gatekeeping functions are:

1) the reporter’s personal and professional news judgment values, 2) bureaucratic or organizational news gathering routines that establish the working relations between reporters and sources, 3) economic constraints on news production such as considerations of cost, efficiency, advertiser potential, and audience demographics, and 4) information and communication technologies that define the limits of time and space and enable the design of news formats that appeal to audiences.[5]

Typically the economic constraints are the barriers to entry. However, with the low cost of setting up a website, low storage costs, and little software knowledge required, there is no barrier to entry. Hence, anybody can participate, as opposed to traditional media, where there’s a clear distinction between broadcaster and viewer:

The public in this relationship between transmission and reception is treated as voyeur, watching events in private, and reacting with private sensation. The transmission engages the sensation. The live shot from the White House at night imparts a sense of sharing the same intimate space. The attractive anchor on camera invites a particular identification, an intimacy unavailable with the reporter merely shown in a photograph doing a telephone feed.[6]

The viewing public on political websites are the primary participants. Our websites most popular features are our political quiz, and our discussion forum. And even our text-based sections elicit sufficient numbers of responses that we can maintain an ongoing volunteer researcher force. The journalist’s role as a transmitter is blurred -- the political Internet is interactive. Passive viewership becomes active participation. the voyeur becomes a participant. The only analogy in broadcast media is talk radio.[7]

The slogan of WRKO 680-AM Talk Radio is, “We’re more than just the news – we’re the people you can talk to.” Talk radio is interactive too, to a much lesser extent than Internet – but this accounts in large part for its popularity. Politics is all about participation, and the Internet is the key to grassroots participation:

Dorie Clark, a former press secretary for the Dean campaign, sums up the benefits for their organizing efforts, “Meetup gets people invested in the campaign. They're not just passive supporters – they're active participants. The more connected people feel to a Dean community, the more likely they will volunteer, and the less likely they will be to change allegiance to another candidate.”[8]

Issue coverage versus “the horse race”

Judging by newspaper coverage, the public is concerned more with who’s ahead in the polls than policy issues, even though that’s recognized as a deficiency:

There are three fundamental kinds of campaign coverage, and two have sort of gotten conflated into bad campaign coverage, and one is supposed to be good. The bad are the horse race coverage and the in-depth profiles that are essentially unearthing secrets. Then you have the good campaign coverage on issues of policy and great national concern.[9]

That’s why we need the political Internet. Reporters will go on reporting on the horse race, while the people who want to know about policy issues will read the Internet. The polls, the stats, who’s ahead where, the horse race – it’s written by wonks for wonks – a closed loop. The more that the horse race is reported, the further away we are from the real issues. Political Internet practitioners see political coverage online as solving the problems of “horse race” reporting:

Newspapers and TV broadcast media are inherently flawed in their coverage of political races. Reporting on the issues is dry. Reporting on the horse race and on scandals is sexy. Yet people want to read about the issues – they just don’t want to read about them every day. The trick is to present the issues when people are ready to read about them. Newspapers and TV can’t do that, and the Internet can, by letting people choose what they want to read about, at the level of detail they want, when they want it, to debate their views directly with people who agree and disagree with them, and even to have some fun while doing it. The interactivity is what lets the political Internet avoid the “horse race.” Newspapers and TV broadcast media are unidirectional -- pundits state their opinions, and the best you can do is yell back fruitlessly at the TV screen. On the Internet, your voice counts[10]

It’s important to keep mainstream media as a base of reference for blogs and interactive websites, so we know that the reporting has been verified. Sites like NYTimes.com, ABC.com, CNN.com and other such sites will always be important sites. Also, some people (because of jobs, families, and other commitments) don’t have time to figure out exactly what they want to read about. Although they may occasionally do a search on a topic, they may want to be just given a news show. Regarding fair and balanced coverage by the traditional media:

The New York Times, I’m afraid, is part of the power structure, along with the other newspapers and TV broadcasters. They’re happy to report on political races from “both” sides, when really there are many more than two sides. They tend to make exactly two sides to every issue -- because that’s how articles have traditionally been written. For example, their war protest coverage included the pro-war protest groups, as if they were equal in size to the anti-war protestors, and they considered that “fair and balanced” coverage. They neglected to report that the anti-war movement was the largest gathering in recorded history -- 15 million people worldwide in one day -- because it was so clearly against the incumbent power structure. The NY Times utterly failed in their duty as journalists to provide reasonable coverage of what should have been reported as a popular uprising. The Internet did report it, which is how we got 15 million people to gather in one day. That number of people could not have been organized that quickly through any other medium.[11]

The New York Times do verify their materials and do seem to have generally fair coverage. Perhaps Mr. Gordon has more radical viewpoints than the New York Times, but they do plenty of horse race coverage, nonetheless.

On-line Interactivity

Another issue is the newly enlarged quantity of news available via the Internet:

…the conventional response of the so-called serious press to the new media culture has been that its place was to add more context and interpretation to the news. The idea was that this would help audiences sort through the information overload, giving the news more meaning. This response to the new technology, we think, is misstated. For one thing, it is impractical to imagine people being their own editor and sorting through reams of unfiltered information. While it is unquestionably true that Internet-connected consumers have more news outlets at their disposal… studies show the time people spend with the news has remained basically static.[12]

Although they may not spend more time with the news, they may be focusing on one story for a longer period of time, getting background information through links or search engines, instead of hearing about 15 other news items which are of no interest to them. The context and interpretation cited above is exactly what people want, but don’t always get through newspapers and TV news.

Context and interpretation are useful – that’s indeed what adds to the printed version of the newspaper. But those are new-tech add-ons to the old way of thinking – to wit, “we, the knowledgeable, provide news to you, the masses.” The new way of political news on the Internet is from a wholly new perspective: We, the voters, provide insight and interpretation to ourselves. Rather than just passively learning from the pundits, people getting political news from the Internet are active political participants. There’s less difference between news-gathering and political activism – which is good news for democracy. [13]

Howard Dean’s candidacy tapped into the anti-incumbency, anti-power-structure attitude by providing people a means to express themselves politically. Dean’s support was never about agreeing with him on the issues -- it was about agreeing that the power structure needed changing:

On our VoteMatch quiz, people wrote us regularly saying how they supported Dean and couldn’t understand why Dean came up so low on their VoteMatch score. Kucinich supporters regularly begged Dean supporters to look at the issues (which they assumed would convert progressives to Kucinich’s clearly more progressive candidacy). Marshall McLuhan in the early days of television as a political medium said, “The medium is the message.” It’s true again now in the early days of the age of Internet politics -- candidates who use the Internet as a means of letting people express their opinions will capture the support of people outside the power structure. Dean couldn’t quite convert that into an electoral victory, but his post-campaign message of “Take Back America” -- via Internet methods, mostly -- is about challenging the incumbent power structure. [14]

Neither newspapers nor traditional campaigns allow individuals to express themselves (with some exceptions like letters to the editor). Grassroots campaigns allow people to express their political views and the Internet is the only place where one is free to speak out.

On-line Archives

On-line archives provide a means to lookup material when voters are interested – via issue stances, debate transcripts, voting records, etc.

There are only two major problems with newspapers: they’re news, and they’re paper. They’re news meansthey cover what happened recently, like covering policy speeches when candidates first unveil them, rather than close to Election Day, when voters are deciding for whom to vote. The Internet can archive materials so that people can read them when they’re interested (near elections). They’re paper means they’re limited in how much material they can present. The Internet has unlimited links.[15]

With the Trent Lott story of December 2002, some reporters had heard his comments about how “we wouldn’t have all these problems” if Thurmond had been elected. Similar comments had been made several times before in public speeches, and an archive search would have turned them up immediately. But it had been put to sleep by the press because as each day passed, this was not considered news any longer.

...the story of Lott’s speech surfaced sporadically in newspapers and on TV talk shows, but was not given sustained or prominent coverage. Among one group of political writers, however, Lott’s words received close and unremitting attention. These were the “bloggers....” While the mainstream media stayed largely silent on Lott, the “blogosphere” hummed with indignation and outrage. Within two weeks, however, the hum would grow into a roar and, under intense pressure from his own party, Lott would step down as majority leader – an event unprecedented in the annals of the Senate. In the aftermath of this unforeseen and, to many, astonishing outcome, some credited bloggers with playing a central role in the unraveling of Lott’s fortunes and hailed them as a potent and unconventional new voice in the nation’s media. [16]

The blogosphere reporting pushed the mainstream reporting – by repetition and by discussion and research by non-professionals. The blogger Atrios observes that blogs offered “a short course on Dixiecrat politics” to help explain the Lott incident. Gordon observes that “OnTheIssues.org includes background information galore – not a frequently-viewed section, except for explaining terms like ‘Dixiecrat.’”

Blogs

One Person, One Blog

The appeal of blogs is that they’re written by one person (easy to do, quick response, opinionated, spurring other responses).

The problem of blogs is that they’re written by one person (not edited or vetted, not verified, unclear who exactly the author is, and if that author represents anyone except himself).

The essence of blogs is that they express the unedited voice of one person at a time. That often has implications for voicing issues that the mainstream media avoid:

The media, [Atrios, a blogger] maintains, “generally have a tin ear when it comes to racial issues,” and were, moreover, constrained by their own conventions. “‘Straight’ journalism,” Atrios argues, “is supposed to play it straight; news articles are supposed to simply be a ‘he said/she said’ kind of thing: report what Trent Lott said, report the responses…. end of story.” But the blogosphere... observed no such journalistic conventions. Bloggers weighed in quickly on Lott...[with] their own acid commentary on the matter. [17]

From a different perspective:

Like talk radio, blogs in some respects provided an arena in which news and commentary could get a first airing without the balanced viewpoints – the ‘he said/she said’ template – that the mainstream media imposed on its news stories. Bloggers were unburdened as well by what Ed O’Keefe calls the “pack mentality” of reporters, which made them hesitant to wade into news stories alone. “Journalists want to report the news,” he says. “They don’t want to make it.” With its unconstrained, outspoken rules of engagement, O’Keefe suggests, “perhaps the blogs were the only place that the [Lott] story could have been birthed.”[18]