October 29, 2006

The 24-Minute News Cycle

The Sunday Tennessean has a good story on how cheap digital communications tools are changing the rules of the campaign game...

Video guerrillas feed on candidates' gaffes The proliferation of Internet video-sharing sites such as YouTube and the use of staffers armed with relatively cheap video technology has changed the face of political communication this year. In the hotly contested race for Senate, the technology has broadcast candidates' potential flaws and miscues far and wide, from Bob Corker's statements on the Iraq war to Harold Ford Jr.'s confrontation with Corker on a Memphis airstrip. Politicians' controversial comments or gaffes can be blown up and spread like wildfire across the Internet and the world of blogs, echoing into the cable television universe and back in a local campaign within the matter of hours, said Bruce Oppenheimer, a Vanderbilt University political science professor.

"Candidates have no privacy anymore," Oppenheimer said. "If you do anything controversial it ends up on YouTube within 12 hours."

Tennessee Republican Party Executive Director Chris Devaney comments that, previously, "you'd have people going to certain events, listening to the speeches and taking notes. This is a new medium. It really is the 24-hour news cycle."

More like the 24-minute news cycle.

And it isn't just video. Plain old text blogs have changed the rules for campaigns to because they can spread candidates' gaffes globally and fast, as Glenn Reynolds notes in a very perceptive post at the Knoxville News Sentinel's No Silence Here blog.