Net War Room for Bush vs Kerry Debate

ancice writes "Article by Wired. Seems like Bush and Kerry are going to battle in cyberspace. The Bush Team is going to have a War Room to provide live rebuttals to thousands of conversative blogs. Not much info on Kerry's response though. This seems like a good use of the Information Super Highway. Would be interesting to see how this War Room will affect the election. Will this tactic be successful or will it be information overload? Worse still, will technology be exploited? Tune in on Thursday."

Comments

In defense of ideological uniformity

[daviddennis]

It's useful right now - look at how conservative bloggers were able to take down CBS news. No matter what you may think of the story, there's no question the memos were forged, and ineptly at that. This story would not have broken without the bloggers.

There is actually enough controversy between people nominally on the same side in sites like Free Republic (right) and Democratic Underground (left) to create effective debates. As a conservative site, Free Republic contains material of all kinds (from The Nation to National Review), and the conservatives who debate range from libertarians to fundamentalists. Democratic Underground is much smaller and ironically has much less tolerance of opposing views than Free Republic. Both sites will delete blatant trolls within seconds, but someone called Liberal Larry has survived on FR for years. He's civil, so he survives. In contrast, I wrote civil messages on DU which people seemed to enjoy responding to and I was deleted simply because I wasn't a liberal. I don't think that would have happened on FR.

A major reason for the emergence of liberal and conservative enclaves is that liberals and conservatives are pretty darn nasty when put in the same web site together, and as a result very little productive discussion actually occurs. This is unfortunate but true.

It's interesting that Slashdot has developed into essentially a liberal ghetto because intelligent conservative posts are moderated down. I have seen this happen to many of my posts, to the extent that I feel unwelcome. As a result, I don't post nearly as much as I did when the section was originally opened.

D

Wired helps excuse the media

[jamie]

The Wired piece helps perpetuate a myth: that in 2000, after the first Bush-Gore debate, it was the GOP that changed the perception from "Gore won" to "Bush won":

After the first debate, Gore advisers thought he had handily won. But a few hours later, the Bush campaign was able to change that perception by disseminating press releases on its websites, through faxes and in e-mails.

Gore's advisers thought he won because he did win. As the Daily Howler points out, the five "instant polls" of viewers after the debate gave Gore the win by an average of 9.6% -- a huge margin, especially considering more Bush supporters were watching.

And that perception did change in the hours and days to come, until finally the American people were browbeaten into believing that Bush had won. But one can't blame GOP press releases and emails. The fault lies squarely on the media, as the Daily Howler has been demonstrating all week.

Whether you think our media has a conservative bias or not, it's indisputable that it let Bush get away with murder after that first debate, refusing to do even basic fact-checking on his blatant errors, and it crucified Gore, mostly by focusing on absurdities and trivia like the color of his suit or his body language. Let's put the blame where blame is due.