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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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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.
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.
The problem with investigate reporting in politics is that it might (gasp!) lead to a conclusion! The mainstream media hates offering conclusions. Just listen to the fucking slogans. "We report, you decide." "Fair and Balanced." "We're Spineless Pussies." (Okay I made that last one up.) The press' notion of "objectivity" is simply parroting whatever government officials tell them, maybe showing a response from the opposition party and not doing a god damn thing to find out whether or not the official statement was full of shit (which it usually is). Because the minute the news starts coming down on one side, they're apparently no longer unbiased.
People seem to have forgotten that that it is perfectly possible to arrive at a conclusion favoring one side of an argument without any bias at all. Bias is not something you deduce by saying, "Whichever side this person supports is the side he's biased toward." Bias is affects the way you look at evidence and evaluate.
But no, everyone except Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Keith Olbermann seems to have forgotten that there do not exist two equally-valid, logical sides to every argument, both sides of an argument do not always deserve equal consideration and in short, sometimes one side is just right, and the other is just wrong.