The Web as Political Weapon 146
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."
A matter of time... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:A matter of time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this comment funny in the context of the article. Look at any politically-oriented blog. They all spend half their time bitching about shitty, biased reporting in the "MSM", and the other half of their time breathlessly quoting whatever paper they just trashed, because that paper happened to write an article which flatters their prejudices.
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Why I hate Digg (Score:2)
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Letters to the editor won't appear until the next day, but what I'm saying right now, will crop up in a couple of seconds(once slashcode's done with it)
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one word. Drudge. Love him hate him. He began this. Drudge put blogs on the map.
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I think you are repeating a popularly fatuous nihilism.
I praise sources like the British Guardian or Independent, for instance, when George Bush talks about a bioweapons site in Iraq and a paper runs an article with photos like, "Here we are on site at the CHICKEN FARM the U.S. recently called a bioweapens facility." I do demand facts from prima
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So where exactly on the web *do* they find factual (fact checked) news? Not from bloggers - who mostly quote each other and the sources you decry. When they aren't doing that - they are producing 'news' that fits their own slant.
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www.commondreams.org, www.truthout.org, www.liarsandcrooks.com, www.worldnews.com, www.americaneconomicalert.org, and you'll have to google the rest as I've got to go now....
Hello? Paging Mr. Harris... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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 Ita
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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
Re:A matter of time... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Mod parent up! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Mod parent up! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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As an aging male nerd, I feel discriminated against; I guess a career in politics is out for me.
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What, that's new? Look at Ahnold dealing with misogynist comments he said decades ago, or Kinky Friedman being pummeled by racist punchlines from jokes he dropped from his repetoire years ago.
Everyone has skeletons in the closet, the politicians that succed are the ones who do the best job of hiding them, or distracting everyone ("I didn't inhale/hav
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So you are saying that a document that was presented as a smoking gun to prove what the democrats wanted to be true definitely was true - even though the document was fraudulent - because we already knew the information that the fraudulent document proved true was true. Even though we had no proof.
Whatever.
The fact is that Dan Rather stepped on his dick by presenting a fraudulent document as true and NOBODY gets away with that shit anymore, left or right. If somebody makes a claim that is false, so
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Unless they have Karl Rove working for them.
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Unless they have Karl Rove working for them.
Moofie: Who the hell is Karl Rove? And what I mean by this is what is his history?
To every republican or conservative I know he is just like, you know, this guy. To democrats and liberals, he is Satan incarnate (well, if they believed in Satan that is), who is a masterful tactician and master manipulator. Every time they mention him it is with fear and loathing.
If he is that good, and the dems want to take over the country, maybe they should offer hi
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Karl Rove is the master of the whisper campaign. I think he is responsible for the tenor of modern American politics, which is a Bad Thing. He is indeed successful. I just wish success tracked more closely to integrity than to stooping to anything.
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But that's not how they presented it. Dan Rather didn't say "Oh here's a document that was transcribed from a carving on the wall made by the man who read the original." They presnted the document as the original, or a
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It's a hypothetical example, and the news program itself is ultimately irrelevant to my point. Would you prefer 20/20? Okay... 20/20 it is.
I wouldn't put it that way (Score:3, Interesting)
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 peo
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What sho
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Fortunately, in the case of Foley, we have stopped a very sick person from preying on children. It sickens me that the Republicans are somehow trying to blame Democrats and web sites about this. This isn't a partisan issue. The man is really messed up and took advantage of his position of power. Any
No fair! (Score:2)
The old media complaint about this?
"Hey, No fair! That's our job!"
What the ... ? (Score:2)
Two of those three "examples" happened on television. During regular news programming.
How is this "new media"?
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I'll disagree with that. (Score:2)
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.
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Not really. (Score:2)
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 tha
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And you get insight from, where? TV news? Come on.
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Not necessarily...Sirota and Palast both have blog sites, as does various former intel guys (www.waynemadsenreport.com and www.noquarter.typepad.com, plus others....)
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Because if it wasn't for the web, these videos would have been swept under the rug rather quickley and we wouldn't have been able to posts links on blogs to youtube.
Remember, most kids these days get their news from the Dailyshow or not at all.
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Nope, it didn't so much fizzle as the government - through MSM newsies on the government payroll (and for any skeptics, please review the media history over the past thirty years) - has now proclaimed that the "innocent" Armitage (mister official neocon bagman) is supposed to have been the first leak. This administration does indeed successfully manipulate the news, which is why the blogosphere in the web continuum will be the only place this subject
Clinton scandal? (Score:4, Insightful)
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However, it was Matt Drudge who frist broke the Monica Lewinsky affair. So Clinton has had a scandal which was majorly affected by the internet. I wonder if the article was really referring to this. But I agree that recent Clinton interview was no "scandal."
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I disagree. The so called Neo-Cons are the big business Republicans.
Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are all different kinds of Conservatives.
LK
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Slashdot Seems Part Of The Problem (Score:1, Interesting)
Natural Effects of Voter Quality (Score:1)
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.
Just google... (Score:2)
Not a good example (Score:2)
Clinton scandal? Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Clinton scandal? Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, it's that balance thing again. You see, if someone points out that all the recent scandals pertain to Republicans, someone's bound to come out complaining about 'bashing' and how the Dems seem to get a free ride from the 'Liberal' media.
No need to consider the real reasons why all the scandals these days are Republican scandals. I mean, no one really wants to admit that when one party takes advantage of the other's incompetence and timidity and runs roughshod over it in the elections, that party tends to pretty much do as it likes in office. And it gets away with bloody murder unless the opposition and the media finally grow a pair and start asking questions, which they don't. Years pass and the incumbents have started taking their privileged place at the trough for granted, which make them lazy and careless. This carelessness leads to some really stupid scandals, which finally tip the balance and let the other party take its place at the trough and complete the cycle.
Nobody wants to talk about that, because if the citizens of a nation were to come to believe this, they'd probably have to revolt. And nobody wants that, the citizens included.
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No he didn't. Read the 911 commission report. There was one possible attempt in 1999 but was called off over intelligence disputes.
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To the contrary. Bill Clinton did miss several opportunities and was "weak" on terrorism in the same way that Bush 1, Regan, and, need it even be said, Carter were.
Terrorism wasn't real for the US until the Towers came down, plain and simple.
I don't like Clinton (and hate to give his supporters any rational defense) but the fact of the matter is that had he killed Osama, we can expect that we would have had the usual reaction of the fanatical faction of the Muslims. So although it may have prevented t
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Maybe yours is, I'm still trying to figure out what happened in the last decade.
I wish.
Well, maybe Clinton didn't, but even if he had, Bush would've ignored it anyway, so it's all his fault.
Two can play the counter-factual accusation game.
politics as ususal (Score:2)
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.
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Not just a political Weapon... (Score:2, Insightful)
Echo Chamber (Score:2)
So it seems one difference in this new media is the ability to quickly gauge the reaction of the public
False equivalence at work, again (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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(If you don't get the joke, search google for loofah)
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What planet are you from? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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OK, who was President the first time the WTC got bombed?
I agree with your overall point, but I think you need to be a little more careful with your rhetoric. As a matter of fact, one could argue that Clinton was in much the same position as Bush II, although certainly with less time on the job.
I do not know what plans Bush I might have left for Clinton, but Clinton was in the seat where the buck stops.
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Because (s)he's trolling, and/or part of the 'backwash'.
The web is awesome (Score:1)
Damn the web is great!
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Obligatory Quote (Score:1)
--H.L. Mencken
This is Totally Amazing! (Score:1)
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.
Web removes the power of news editors (Score:1)
The web also removes regional biases by giving us access to news and opinions from other parts of the country an
Fundamentally unfit (Score:1)
Congratulations! You're all winners!
Subverting the New Media (Score:2)
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 obvio
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It doesn't appear all that hard to manually look for users with inactive histories. A good chunk of Friend and Foe listings for low numbered users are likely to be for other low numbered users, making it easy to look for whole blocks of possible inactives.
With ID and Nym generally linked, it's pretty easy to tell who else is a low numbered user,
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Good point. But then, you're talking about looking at comment histories, and there are many people who read slashdot but don't bother to post. There's no "last login was" message in the user info page.
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What exactly has me worked up lately, causing me to troll slashdot? I come to slashdot primarily for techology and other nerdly stuff primarily. I expect a little politics to be thrown into some things because they overlap and it is acceptable in moderation. However, ever s
In other news, (Score:2)
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.
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Cough... Barney Frank... Cough
It is just jolley politics in the good 'ol USA.
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Doh. I fucked up with a misspelling of jolly.
Oh. By the way. I trust the National Enquirer over Drudge. I will need some pretty good evidence that Foley was "set up" before I buy off on that one. Set-up, of course, meaning by another person. Foley set himself up a long time ago.
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And as far as the news goes, RT(his)FA [fair.org] and please RT(his)FA [floonet.net].
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Yeah sorry.
I must have been thinking about Gerry Studds and the 17-year-old male page. Barney is the one whose lover ran the underage call-boy service out of Barney's house.
Pedophilia? What, do you think Foley's victim was eight, 10 or 14?
The fact that the pubs didn't remove this guy because he was one of their own is no surprise. That is what partisans do. But that does not negate the fact that this "sudden" insight by the crats that this type of behavior is "immoral and horrific" is polit
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I love listening to Hastert say "The buck stops HERE. It's the DEMOCRATS' fault! I got all confused when they told me to be nice to homos."
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I guess the
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Uh, yeah, because the Republicans would never stoop so low, right?
The Republicans are despicable. The Democrats are almost equally despicable. The only difference is, the Republicans are doing their level best to destroy the ideals of our nation, AND raise taxes (Or the deficit, which is the same thing with a lousy interest rate). The Democrats just want to raise taxes.
Guess which is the lesser of two weevils.
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100% Flamebait
I point out the simple logical fallacy in the article that hides Republican "kill the messenger" tricks, which fallacy slimes a popular 2-term US president, and my post is "Flamebait"?
Republican TrollMods have gotten so addicted to power that they can't stand seeing it crack in front of their faces.
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Actually, "interesting" only in the aggregate, in a sociological way. Like gnats hitting the windshield. Engaging wiper fluid...