I liked the way Rollingstone put it, “The First YouTube Election“. Republican Senator George Allen’s racist comments found its way upto youtube. Then it got picked up by major news networks like CNN. Public figures have to get used to this new media, a world where they are constantly under observation and any small mistake or off hand comment can get magnified into something potentially career damning.
There’s a paradigm shift under way and politicians like Allen, and to a lesser extent Joe Lieberman and Barbara Boxer, are learning it the hard way. The barriers to video broadcast are now gone. So an opposing campaign no longer has to rely on a local news station or CNN or CSPAN to run video of a gaffe. Any dolt with a handicam now can capture the unscripted reality of a candidate and disseminate it worldwide.If it generates enough buzz in the blogosphere, the cable networks will even pick it up, as happened almost immediately with Allen’s monkeyboy dig.
CNN, BBC and others have realised the potential of so called “citizen’s media” with the introduction of features like “iReport” by CNN. CNN encourages its viewers/readers to send across photos/video’s to put across their stories. A lot of these videos are then shown in primetime shows like Paula Zahn now and others. The flow of news now in lot of these instances is reversed, from people to the blogsphere and then to news networks.
