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The Web as Political Weapon
cultrhetor writes "John Harris of the Washington Post has noticed that the three largest recent political controversies have stemmed from work done by digital inhabitants. In the article, New Media a Weapon in the New World of Politics, he notes the connections between the recent scandals involving Mark Foley, George Allen, and Bill Clinton were representative of the new, web-driven age of American politics." From the article: "Each originally percolated in the world of new media — Web sites and news outlets that did not exist a generation ago — before charging into the traditional world of newspapers and television networks. In each case, the accusations quickly pivoted into a debate about the motivations and alleged biases of the accusers. Cumulatively, the stories highlight a new brand of politics in which nearly any revelation in the news becomes a weapon or shield in the daily partisan wars, and the aim of candidates and their operatives is not so much to win an argument as to brand opponents as fundamentally unfit."
This is the problem with most folks in Washington DC. I read this article this morning and thought "well, yeah....". For those of us that have been using the Internet since (or in close proximity to) it's DARPA days, the fact that the Internet is being used for political purposes is not surprising or new for that matter.
What is new I believe is that we now have a critical mass or a critical number of participants present on the Internet. I hate to say it, because I loathe the term, but what John Harris (author of the Washington Post article) has discovered is "Internet 2.0", or the evolution and delivery of many of the promises that the Internet originally offered. And, like any tool, those that have been around for a while knew that the Internet can and will be used as both tools for good and as a weapon for selfish, self-aggrandizing acts, subversion and propaganda.
It was only a matter of time...
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The Web as Political Weapon
The old media complaint about this?
"Hey, No fair! That's our job!"
about 10 years ago..
Distraction was about just that, kinda scary.
Two of those three "examples" happened on television. During regular news programming.
How is this "new media"?
....till astroturfing ruins it....further.
Sorry, I fail to see how Clinton's reaction to that Fox question constitutes a scandal. There was a REAL Clinton scandal once, but trying to shoehorn this in as anything more than a brief display of anger is pretty ridiculous.
Post haste.
"You're either web us or against us." ;-)
Each originally percolated in the world of new media -- Web sites and news outlets that did not exist a generation ago -- before charging into the traditional world of newspapers and television networks
Except the Lewinsky scandal, the only one of these three scandals which so far has been known to have any political impact... which definitely first appeared on the internet,
but first made it to the internet in the form of a story that Michael Isikoff had written a story for old-media standard Newsweek about the affair but Newsweek hadn't published it yet,
and was only able to make it to Newsweek and thus the internet at all because of tapes recorded at the behest of Lucianne Goldberg, a book publisher and old-media mogul if ever there was one.
The internet isn't a change in who holds power over the media. It's just a change in how those who hold power over the media use it.
This is the only way we can take back control from the rich white men with agendas who run these big media coroporations.
It's still the same old media spewing the same old stories. For some reason, people don't believe news is news unless it comes from the TV or newspaper. Bloogers rights, please? Most judges say NO! There is a call for a real media revolution!
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Sure it would have. We used to see that all the time in newspapers and on television and the radio. A local group does some digging and finds something and it becomes a nation-wide sensation.
But that is more about the current state of "news programming" (it sucks) than about "new media".
We used to have "investigative reporting" and such. Think back to Watergate.
Every weekend /. seems to get deeper into the political articles that are geared for creating more heat than light. It's becoming an end in itself and looks bad.
...that the Mark Foley stuff didn't come out until JUST before the 2006 election?
Apparently people had known about it since this time last year and did nothing about it - presumably because it wasn't an election year and it wouldn't have hurt the Republicans.
Then, suddenly, as the 2006 elections are about to be held, BANG! Out comes the Mark Foley stuff.
I wonder how long the Democrats actually knew about it before releasing it... (I'm well aware that the Republicans were aware of it before the Democrats, but I still get the feeling that they sat on it until the right time for maximum political damage. Doesn't excuse the Republicans from trying to cover it up, of course, but I can't help feeling like announcing it now was a Democrat power play.)
As long as it's easier to buy votes with volume than reason, debates of this nature will continue. When shouting loudest stops winning elections, the dialog will become more civil and the debates will be about issues rather than about men.
Competency tests for voters and candidates would be a good start. Of course, SCOTUS decided that was illegal in the early '70s, so I suppose we'll just shout ourselves hoarse.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
Will go the way of Digital (DEC). Ten years, max.
Shame on me for not reading the article before commenting. I saw "Clinton scandal" and assumed it meant the Lewinsky scandal.
Of course, the Lewinsky scandal would have been a better selection as an example of news breaking on the internet than the "Clinton Scandal" they selected, since in fact it turns out the "Clinton Scandal" the slashdot blurb referred to was... Clinton's interview on Fox News television several weeks ago?
What the heck? That's a scandal? In what universe? I thought that was just Bill Clinton actually defending his record instead of rolling over when Fox News attacked him to his face, and Fox News running around whining for the next week about how mean Bill Clinton was to them. Even if it is a scandal, what in God's name does it have to do with the Internet? It's as the writer here (or at least the Slashdot submitter, since the writer's mention of Clinton was somewhat more complex than the summary makes it out to be) is trying to make what Bill Clinton did on Fox News a few weeks ago seem bad, by finding an excuse to put it in the same paragraph with George Allen's ethnic slurs and Mark Foley's sexual predation.
Limbaugh runs a radio show. A RADIO show. People might want to look up "Tokyo Rose" from 60 years ago.
The "change" isn't to a "new media".
The real change is that the existing media (newspapers, TV and radio) have abandoned most of the investigative reporting.
Now they just sit back and report on the "story" that website X is getting a lot of hits from a posting about a video clip about some politician you've never heard of.
The "old media" is "reporting" on what the current buzz is. That's all.
It's not that the Internet has become a deadly effective political weapon. It's that the Internet lets anyone who has enough time, skill, and motivation to find out the truth.
Note well: By "tbe truth" I don't mean "the truth about someone's character", but rather "the truth about an event" or some such. That is, if someone said or did something, ever, in any context, there's probably someone who can find out about it on the net.
So what's really going on is that the Internet has turned the truth about people's past actions and statements into a deadly effective political weapon.
This is good and bad. It's bad because, as far as I can tell, it can only be used to destroy people. It's good because I think that the fewer politicians with enormous gaps between their public image and reality, the better.
...the term "failure" and click "I'm feeling lucky". Funny as hell, but gotta admit another symptom of the web as political warfare tool.
Woodward was part of the Watergate coverage. That was over 30 years ago. The closest we have now is The Daily Show.
And my point is that the "bloggers" have not ascended, but that what now passes for "investigative reporting" has declined to the point where it isn't any better than those "bloggers".
That is my point. The "old media" is not publishing/supporting the reporters any more. Instead, we get whatever they can find on some guy's website. Whether it is factual or not is not an issue.
The issue is whether it is getting a lot of page hits. Popularity vs insight. And popularity is winning.
This Harris guy from the Washington Post is a well-known wanker. He and another tool named Halperin have just written a book (it came out this week) with the 5-alarm EXTRA! EXTRA! bit of news that the Internet is now having a big effect in American politics.
Harris and Halperin have been running around the big news shows saying that Drudge is "The New Walter Cronkite". Give me an effin' break. Drudge is the guy who's been saying that the real criminals in this Foley scandal are those demonic teenagers who "baited" Foley into asking them to measure their hogs and send him pictures. Excuse me, but no amount of "baiting" is going to get me to ask somebody to send me a picture of their apparatus. Most people I know aren't going to be "baited" into becoming sexual predators.
So Harris and Halperin are saying that "Gee, the news media really is so liberal that the only answer is to make sure that every single story is as "fair" and "balanced" as possible. To them, this means that if you have Republicans taking millions of dollars from Jack Abramoff in order to change their votes on the floor of Congress, you also have to point out that Democrats took $184.35 from Abramoff's next door neighbor and pretend that their equal.
Really, there comes a time when a government is so out of hand that the last thing you want is a news media that's trying its best not to offend anyone, while at the same time you've got douchebags like Hannity and Limbaugh telling people that "Liberals Must Die".
Fact is, Harris and Halperin, as top representatives of a media structure that has failed to make a peep while an insane Administration is sending young Americans off to die in order to make the President and VP feel like they've got big dicks OUGHT to go down the tubes. They OUGHT to be ashamed of themselves, but not for being liberal, but for being stenographers in a period of American History when we sorely needed some voices of outrage.
Oh, and "Sgt Doom"... if you think you're getting more "factual" news from Fox than you do from the New York times, you've really got to lay off huffing cleaning fluid. It's messing with you, dude.
You are welcome on my lawn.
he notes the connections between the recent scandals involving Mark Foley, George Allen, and Bill Clinton were representative of the new, web-driven age of American politics."
What scandal? Oh, you mean this? "Former president Bill Clinton had a televised temper fit when an interviewer challenged his terrorism record."
"Temper fit" is a "scandal"? The interviewer provoked it by repeating the Bush administration rhetoric that he was "weak" on terrorism. Given that Bush brushed aside reports with titles like "Al-Qaeda to attack US targets in the coming months" and Rice was REPEATEDLY warned about the threat Al-Qaeda represented and yet did nothing...yeah, I think Clinton has a right to be pretty pissed at mindless rhetoric.
He raised his voice, came out of his chair a bit, and controlled the conversation long enough to cover the facts: a)yeah, he missed Bin Laden and he regrets it but b)he did more than Bush ever did.
Bush and his staff ignored patently obvious and repetitive evidence of an impending terrorist attack, declared Bin Laden his number one target and then a year later, suddenly told everyone it really wasn't actually all THAT important to get Bin Laden. Who, I might remind everyone, is still alive five years after "that fateful day".
Bush has had a trillion dollars, two military campaigns, a dozen or more grossly unconsitutional laws/acts and five years to fix things, and the only thing he's done is paint a giant target on the US by acting like a treaty-ripping baffoon on the stage of world politics and invading sovereign nations where there is a substantial number of people who belong to a religion which spawns aggressive, violent groups at the drop of a hat. Just you watch- he's about to do it again in a few months when North Korea goes "nuclear", and we'll be lucky if it doesn't destabilize the whole region by dragging China, Japan, and of course South Korea...then Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia...and all their corresponding allies (Britain, France, Australia, etc)- into World War 3.
Please help metamoderate.
How is This diffrent then before? It always been easier to Say "look they are scary", then to present your own Ideas.
Its a fundimental problem with the current 2 party system. With more candidates it becomes harder to do this, you don't look Nearly as good if you are tring to bash 5 diffrent people as if you are tring to bash 1.
--meh--
The web has turned into the biggest gossip spreading rumor mill in history... Oprah would be proud.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
So it seems one difference in this new media is the ability to quickly gauge the reaction of the public.
No need to wait for polling data; throw something out there and see if people react the way you want. If not, adjust message, lather, rinse, repeat.
A Human Right
Cases in point: (1) On an Italian site many months ago we first learned that Accenture had been contracted to bring in rigged voting machines for the Italian elections by former - and ousted president - Berlisconi. Their exit polls showed Berlisconi losing by 1 million votes - while the rigged count displayed only 25,000 votes. Either way - he lost - but we now realize Accenture's activity in the matter. (2) Foreign news reports stating that some British SAS (their special ops organization) refused to return to Iraq to fight beside the American forces as they strongly disagreed with the American strategy and behavior over there. No where did these stories appear in the popular, MSM American news....
We see yet again another example of the so-called "non-biased" media equating a pedophile (Foley) and a racist (Allen), both Republicans, with a former president upset about being misrepresented in a movie purporting to be based on real events, when it was based on what the right-wing wanted you to believe were the real events.
In this case, the Clinton scandal was really the Clinton-haters lying (yet again). But that's beside the point.
What this is is the typical example of balance
1. Show a major Republican gaffe
2. Show a minor Democratic gaffe
3. Claim that both parties are guilty, so neither has the moral high ground.
4. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Yes, before the web, I couldn't post a link ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAUxkJP4k20 ) where the Republicans call a local canidate a Commie.
Damn the web is great!
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule and both commonly succeed, and are right."
--H.L. Mencken
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
It's almost as if the Internet is a part of real life!
Even Washington is beginning to at least see, if not accept that fact.
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I think we're witnessing, for lack of a better term, the democratization of the news. Under the old model the editor (and by extension the publisher) is able to control what gets printed or broadcast. If there's a bias on the editors' part it's easy to spin the facts. Little stories sometimes lead to larger ones, but only if the people who make the story assignments agree to print or show them.
The web also removes regional biases by giving us access to news and opinions from other parts of the country and other parts of the world. My local editors might be biased, or have a set of biases that don't agree with mine. It's now a lot easier to find people who agree with my point of view, as well as see what's important in other regions.
To paraphrase Slashdot: News for everyone. Stuff that matters.
Well, you're an anonymous coward, so I can't call you a gullible idiot to your face, but you are.
He did refute the facts. He blew up at the interviewer after the interviewer pestered him for a few minutes. It was almost as if the interviewer *wanted* him to fly off the handle. Hell, the interviewer would hardly let him get a word in edgewise.
And for your information: according to Richard Clarke (Clinton's "Terrorist Czar") and other members of the Clinton cabinet, Clinton had set up a substantial, feasible anti-terrorist plan specifically targeted to al Queda. That was one of the first things that the new President Bush dismantled, not long before he sent $42,000,000 to the Taliban. Clinton did *not* allow the nation to be attacked. If anyone did, it would be Bush, having ignored a fairly specific document titled something along the lines of, "Al Queda determined to attack on US soil," which circulated a few weeks before the attacks.
As far as Foley sending messages that were in poor taste, those messages could be used to prosecute him for sexual misconduct if he weren't in a position of power; the fact they were directed to 15 year-old boys kind of indicates he likes 'em young.
Draw your own conclusions.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"...the aim of candidates and their operatives is not so much to win an argument as to brand opponents as fundamentally unfit."
Congratulations! You're all winners!
For example, with slashdot, it looks to me like there's a bunch postings originating from what I think of as "the rover boys": hired-gun Republican sock-puppets that come out of the woodwork when a subject like election fraud is under discussion.
(I think these are usually distinguishable from real human beings that happen to be conservative, though this is obviously always a judgement call).
One of the things that I think is funny is that they often have surprisingly low slashdot ids... which leaves only two choices: (1) a bunch of the old guard computer nerds (who stereotypically I'd expect to be libertarian or liberal) have suddenly become a particuarly low-brow kind of conservative; (2) the rover boys have some way of stealing slashdot accounts, and they've snagged some of the ones that were created early and then abandoned.
Obviously, I favor hypothesis (2), which raises the question of how exactly they did it. Running crack on slash accounts would presumably be a tricky business, because obviously the slashdot uber-geeks would be watching out for such an obvious attack. (Right?) Network sniffing would presumably be too slow a way to go about it, because by definition you'd only sniff passwords from active accounts, and then you'd have to wait for them to become inactive (well... unless you went around assasinating people for their slash accounts. But that's getting a little too paranoid, even for me).
So what do you think? Would slashdot be crackable by the sufficiently motivated?
Or course, one possibility would be that slashdot itself has been infiltrated: they could've planted someone on the staff in order to get database access. (Or possibly resorted to bribery?)
Do we really need to state the obvious? In politics, people use whatever tools are at their disposal. Technology has always been one of those tools, whether it be the harvesting machine, the motor car, the television, or space craft.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Hannity and Limbaugh telling people that "Liberals Must Die".
Have you ever listened to Hannity or Limbaugh? Can you cite a single reference of either saying "Liberals Must Die?" You do realize that the little quotation marks mean it's an exact quote and not you just paraphrasing, right?
I have an idea... how about you stop just regurgitating what other people have told you to think, listen to a variety of news outlets yourself (hint: The Daily Show, DU and Randi Rhodes isn't a variety of news) and use the thing between your ears for more than just reciting propaganda. When you say stuff like that, you completely discredit yourself and thus any points you make.
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Stop Koolaid Politics Troll
ditto
I am Ukrainian and live in Kyiv. Back in 2004 we had presidential elections ending almost in a tie for two candidates. There was evidence for falsifications made by goverment in favor of their political successor. Due to the high level of state influence on the media, Internet became the first tribune for the opposition. It helped to encourage the mainstream media not to obey censorship, with information spread leading to public protests which resulted in a revolution. You cannot overestimate role of the Internet in politics. (The whole story is here.)
Can someone show me where "Mark Foley, George Allen, and Bill Clinton" or their supporters attacked their accusers solely on their motivations?
OK, Foley and Allen, but not Clinton.
How about where "Mark Foley, George Allen, and Bill Clinton" were attacked by their accusers solely on their motivations?
OK, Clinton but not Foley and Allen.
And how about showing me some distinction between Web vs TV criticism, more or less attacking solely motivations?
Right - about the same for both. Though Web criticism, even faster paced than TV (without a rigid broadcast schedule and filler commercials), does happen sooner. Especially because more of the process from the originators can be seen on the Web, rather than just the eventual "final product" on TV.
Looked at without the Republican corporate mass media agenda to confuse the issues, the actual trend is clear. Republicans attack messengers because the negative messages are usually true. And the Web is faster and more "raw" than TV, so those attacks start there.
The election of people unfit to lead is left as an exercise to the reader.
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make install -not war
Since you mentioned that evil, "Fox News," you may be interested in a case where a legal case the judge found in favor of Fox for lying - stating that it was OK for Fox to lie publicly. Truly representative of how abysmal this sorry country has become.
Brin and Sergey are well known Liberals.
Sorry to criticize that other site, but the thing is that when it started out, I really used to love it, and abandoned Slashdot for it wholeheartedly. But now I've had to feel back here, because every second article on Digg is just some user-submitted attack on Bush. Hey, I'm critical of Bush too, but does this topic have to be featured in every second or third story submission there? Can they find a broader range of topics, please? It's getting really stagnant.