The governator twittering?
- Image via Wikipedia
I am not sure if this is a sign that Twitter has gotten to the point of performing an aerial maneuver over a large cartilagenous fish, but California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been on Twitter since October.
But the real problem with the presence is that it’s obvious this is just a tool for some PR lackey to put out press releases. Would the real governor refer to himself in the third person as in this tweet:
Gov. Schwarzenegger Signs Legislation Banning Use of Electronic Text Messaging Devices While Driving http://gov.ca.gov/press-rel…
The Governor also isn’t following anybody. Seems you’d want to at least follow some of the other leaders of the California government.
I don’t have a problem with marketing and political types using social media to spread their messages. Really, it’s their playground too. But if you’re going to enter the arena, at least adhere to the rules of the road. Engagement with the broader community is at the root of social media.
Don’t use Twitter like a broadcast medium.
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Blagojevich statement wordle
Since it seems the Illinois governor can’t keep himself out of the headlines, here’s a Wordle I created from Blagojevich’s last statement on Dec. 20, 2008:
Coming from Texas, living right next door to Louisiana, I thought I’d seen it all when it came to state political corruption. Little did I know…
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Leading the political blogs
UPDATE: Jeff Bercovici at Portfolio.com asks some more questions:
Open-ended question that I can’t even begin to answer: Is an upsurge in liberal sentiment driving the traffic growth to liberal sites? Or do sites like Huffpo and Daily Kos deserve some of the credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) for the current pro-Democratic trend in politics?
Interesting numbers posted by paidContent about the top political weblogs this campaign season. Just for fun, I coded the sites along political leanings (red-conservative, blue-liberal/progressive, black-objective/centrist):
Total Unique Visitors (000)
Sep-2007 Sep-2008 % Change
Total Internet: Total Audience 181,858 189,468 4
HUFFINGTONPOST.COM 792 4,545 474
POLITICO.COM 532 2,362 344
DRUDGEREPORT.COM 1,215 2,059 70
REALCLEARPOLITICS.COM 192 1,129 489
FREEREPUBLIC.COM 1,022 987 -3
Capitol Advantage 794 959 21
DAILYKOS.COM 192 923 381
TOWNHALL.COM 407 884 117
NEWSBUSTERS.ORG 113 732 547
WORLDNETDAILY.COM 411 636 55
TALKINGPOINTSMEMO.COM 32 458 1,321
MICHELLEMALKIN.COM 103 247 140
REDSTATE.COM 38 235 514
CROOKSANDLIARS.COM 122 218 79
RAWSTORY.COM 219 212 -3
POLLSTER.COM N/A 194 N/A
MEDIAMATTERS.ORG 145 178 23
FIVETHIRTYEIGHT.COM N/A 169 N/A
CQPOLITICS.COM N/A 139 N/A
AMERICABLOG.COM N/A 104 N/A
The results:
Conservative: 8 (5,992)
Liberal/Progressive: 7 (6,595)
Objective/Centrist: 5 (4,783)
A pretty even breakdown between conservatives and liberal/progressives (although Huffingtonpost.com represents a majority of the liberal/conservative traffic. Obviously, all these blogs are benefiting from the intense scrutiny of this historic election.
Rafit Ali asks an important question:
And while these numbers are in and of itself interesting, the biggest question for any of them is what happens the day after?
I suspect many of these sites will do well in the coming year, although certainly not as well as they are doing during the campaign season. Remember that many of these sites (Daily Kos or RedState, for instance) have an agenda, and the agenda doesn’t stop with the election - especially not this election season, with the economy, war, and health insurance promising to be at the forefront of the next president’s agenda.
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Media frenzy: the Palin files
Image by bobster1985 via Flickr For the past five days, I’ve been riveted by the media frenzy over vice presidential pick Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska. What strikes me most is the way the media - print, tv, radio, online - have rushed to fill in the details on the sketchy knowledge available about the candidate.
They say that nature abhors a vacuum. I would suggest that the media abhors a vacuum even more. Since the announcement, we’ve learned about Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy, “Troopergate,” her support for the “Bridge to Nowhere,” her husband’s involvement in the Alaska Independence Party, her lobbying for federal funds for local project, her role in a 527 for Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, and who knows what will turn up in the days to come.
Also fascinating was the Wikipedia battle that arose from the appearance of a user “YoungTrig,” who began editing Palin’s Wikipedia entry the day before the announcement. Check out this NPR story for more details on that angle.
What to make of all this? Certainly there has been a rush from both the G.O.P. and the Democrats to “define” Palin one way or the other. But the definition is hinging on the reporting of media outlets and bloggers, responding to a wide-open v.p. pick with the type of reporting you probably wouldn’t have seen had the pick been a “known quantity” like Min. Gov. Pawlenty or former presidential aspirant Mitt Romney.
It’s too soon to see what damage all these revelations might have on the McCain campaign, but it’s fascinating to watch the media in action. Naturally, the McCain campaign has complained that the media are being “vicious and scurrilous” in their Palin stories.
I don’t really see that as the case. The media are doing their job. They are retroactively vetting the McCain vice presidential pick. They did the same to a lesser extent with Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s pick. But Biden was a known entity. He’d been a presidential candidate twice, and a senator for a long time. If Obama (who has had his own taste of the media scrutiny) had picked a little-known governor from a small (population) state, he’d have witnessed the same intense scrutiny of his pick.
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Obama’s text message on the veep
Image via Wikipedia Following up on the panel at AEJMC about the Internet in the 2008 political season, Garrett M. Graff explains the way Barack Obama’s text message alert about his vice presidential selection is actually a means to a larger end.
But announcing Mr. Obama’s running mate by text message has little to do with proclaiming the selection and everything to do with getting out the vote on Election Day in November. The move should add thousands — and more likely tens or hundreds of thousands — of cellphone numbers to what is already one of the most detailed political databases ever created.
A study conducted during the 2006 elections showed that text-message reminders helped increase turnout among new voters by four percentage points, at a cost of only $1.56 per vote — much cheaper than the $20 or $30 per vote that the offline work of door-to-door canvassing or phone banking costs.
It’s a shrewd way to get new contacts into a campaign database, and I suspect it’s something that more candidates will be doing in future elections. It will be interesting to see whether such TXT GOTV methods actually increase turnout by 4 percent or more. That’s a huge number in a presidential campaign, and if it’s effective, might be Obama’s tipping point.
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The role of the Internet in the 2008 campaign - AEJMC
Update: Alfred Hermida posted a video interview with Georgia10. Check it out.
This morning, I sat in a panel about the role of the Internet in the 2008 campaign. Here are my notes from the panel:
Aaron Smith - Pew Internet researcher: Two trends - 73 percent of americans are internet users. this campaign, we’re seeing record-setting levels of interest in the campaign. 40 percent of all adults were going online to get information about politics. 20 percent were going online every day to get political information. Online video - 1/3 have watched online videos about politics - double in the past (13 percent). Primary, unfiltered campaign materials - 1/3 of internet users. web 2.0 is 10-15 percent of internet users. compared to 04-06, double or triple from small starting point. Social networking sites - first time we asked about sn sites. this year, 10 percent of all adults have gotten some sort of campaign or political information from social networking sites. 2/3 of 18-29 year olds have profiles - 1/2 of them have used those sites to get political information.
Mark Tremaine - UT-Austin: 2008 - what’s happened is a lot of top blogs have become group blogs. During the Democratic primaries, objective blogs didn’t succeed. Clinton/Obama split occurred on the liberal blogs, not strictly along gender lines.
Georgia Logothetis - Daily Kos - georgia10: The blogging medium has exploded within the last 5 years.
1. the interaction between blogs and the traditional media, and what effect will the blogs have on the fall election?
The type of people that blog are not elite, they’re not a specific class. It’s empowering, and that’s what the medium does. It’s empowering for the average american to go into a medium and say “I have a valid opinion about politics.”
(Blogs) operate as a fact-checker on the traditional media. Beauty of the blogging medium … when I post a blog post, when I cite to something, I have to hyperlink to my source. when someone writes an opinion piece, they don’t have to disclose to the reader their sources.
Context - blogging has exploded. citizen empowerment. along with empowerment comes a more rabble-rousing electorate. People become more informed. they are demanding more from their politicians.
Tom Johnson - Texas Tech: Social network sites have really played a major role, particularly with the Obama campaign. You tube is a two-edged sword for candidates. it allows them to present themselves unvarnished in the media. No real control over what gets posted. Any gaffe that they make gets on there. Social networks makes politics local. Supporters keep in contact with each other. Way to connect with young voters. To a certain degree, pollsters have underestimated the power (facebook) has.
Bill Adee - Chicago Tribune director of innovation: (Regarding the John Edwards affair story) One of the huge issues facing organizations like the Chicago Tribune. We would have gotten killed by our readers for (covering the story in October). By not doing so, we’re getting killed today. We get held to a standard that our own readers aren’t willing to hold themselves to. More than our business model, it’s also our journalism that’s putting us in a tough spot too - the standards we’re holding ourselves to.
Batman = Bush? Not hardly
Image via WikipediaI’m a little late on this, but just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to comment.
Dr. Steven Taylor knocks a few major holes in the ridiculous assertion in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal that President George W. Bush is somehow akin to Batman of “The Dark Knight.” Taylor’s critique is worth a read, but makes me question the wisdom of the Wall Street Journal op-ed editors for putting that type of nonsense in valuable newsprint.
Taylor’s ultimate sentence is an excellent summation:
There is no such easy path in the real world, which is why comic books and fantasy novels aren’t particularly good blueprints for foreign policy.
One thing that is somewhat troubling to me about Mr. Klavan’s twisted logic (something Taylor doesn’t touch on in his critique) is the assumption that there is some sort of moral equivalence between an elected official and a masked vigilante. Klavan writes:
There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.
It is one thing for a masked vigilante in a piece of fiction to “confront villains in the only terms they know.” It is quite another to suggest that the President of the United States, the most powerful elected official in the world, should be praised for stooping to the level of terrorists (it appears that’s what Klavan is praising).
Also, note that the Batman himself engaged the Joker and his henchmen, the mob and other criminals. The president uses the armed forces of the United States. Big difference there.
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Dog whistles and politics
Image by comicbase via FlickrThis summer, I taught a class at Eastern Illinois called “Freedom of Expression,” a senior seminar that dealt with the first amendment and its evolution in American judicial and political history.
Throughout the course, we had the opportunity to delve into some of the aspects of the current campaign for the U.S. presidency. One of those aspects that I found fascinating was the rise of a word in the political lexicon: dog whistle, as in “dog whistle politics.”
The use of “dog whistle” isn’t new to this campaign, but the term is relatively new, appearing (from my limited research for class) only in the late 1990s in relation to politics, and originating in the Australian political campaigns of prime minister John Howard.
Today, Melissa McEwan in the Guardian (U.K.) explains what a dog whistle is, how it works, and why it’s such a pernicious piece of political strategy. To wit:
The dog whistle piques them with something the average person won’t see as bigoted, but that the constituency for which they advocate (and/or of which they’re a part) will expect them to call out, because they instantly spy it and recognize it for what it is; they’ve heard the tune of that particular string being plucked their whole lives. Then whoever calls it out is marginalized as a hysteric, over-reactionary, looking to get offended, etc.
It’s a pretty good primer and one I’ll bookmark for any future discussions of the topic.
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