Will social media ever be the primary driver in electing a president?

By Richard Barry

A piece by Ryan Cooper in The Week raises an interesting, if overstated, point that 2016 could be the first election in which the political press is sidelined. He argues that politicians are becoming so adept at using social media that they can effectively get their messages out unaided by the reporters who typically follow them around, literally and metaphorically.

He adds that "no journalist has the kind of media celebrity and cultural credibility (as Tim Russert used to have) that once made interviews mandatory for aspiring presidents." 

On this view, political stars can be neither made nor broken by a handful of powerful people. 

One sign, he writes, that politicians are starting to understand this is that Hillary Clinton is in no hurry to engage reporters as a way to sell herself to the voting public, hence the complaint that she hasn't taken many direct questions. 

Mr. Cooper's argument leads him to the conclusion that campaign reporters do little good because candidates are disinclined to answer tough questions, and reporters are, in any case, more interested in "inane questions about process, the horse race, or gaffes." 

In what he calls the "gaffe-centric media coverage . . . the slightest misstep or embarrassing picture can lead to a days-long Internet firestorm."

Following the logic of the argument, in the days when engaging political reporters was an absolutely necessary way for a candidate to push his or her message and raise their profile, there was always a risk that something untoward would be said or done by the candidate and that the reporter or reporters in the scrum or at the event or somewhere on the campaign trail would get their gotcha moment.

But if candidates can communicate directly with voters through Twitter, Facebook, websites, web ads, etc., why would they risk putting themselves in the position of being unable to control how they are perceived?

They wouldn't, which makes Mr. Cooper think reporters should mostly leave candidates alone and go off and write "more interesting and substantive articles using public communications, polling, policy documents, and so forth." 

I'm all for more substantive articles. 

The general point that social media may allow candidates to pay less attention to mainstream media has, no doubt, some validity. And there may well come a time when social media is powerful enough to elect a president, but we are not there yet. 

I think what this means is that we are in a transition period in which candidates are trying to gauge how well they can control their own message through social media, understanding, despite Mr. Cooper's argument, that mainstream political reporting is not dead yet, and it still has to be engaged in a significant sense. 

This is what I find most interesting. It's not an either/or proposition, it's a matter of proportion between the influence of the relatively anarchic realm of social media and the centralized power of major media conglomerates, and the reporters who work for them. 

It's also worth noting that social media and corporate media are not entirely separate entities. I'm reminded of the fact that the first time I saw Hillary Clinton's campaign announcement web video was on CNN. And my guess is that those reporters Mr. Cooper thinks will play a diminishing role campaigns can actually do a lot to promote or bury a given candidate's social media profile. Again, not either/or. 

I recall something I once heard on an episode of the West Wing, which is that one ought "never argue with a man who buys [printer's] ink by the barrel." The political press still buys the stuff by the barrel and I don't think we will see them sidelined by 2016, and I wouldn't suggest pissing them off for all the Tweets in the world. 

But I look forward to a time when the balance shifts, when candidates won't have to be vetted and approved by a centralized corporate media, when there will be a way around them, although I suspect in the end corporate media will simply find more effective ways of controlling social media. 

Thoughts on the vicious attack in Boston: reckless speculation, responsible reporting, and the humanity that binds us together

By Michael J.W. Stickings

With information still coming in and speculation running wild, I don't have a great deal to say about the attack -- criminal and possibly terrorist, but it is premature to comment -- that occurred in Boston on Monday, near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. (It's a city, and larger metropolitan area, that I love a great deal and feel a deep connection to, from my four years at Tufts.)

I spent much of the day and evening on Twitter, reading my feed and also tweeting myself, and re-tweeting others. Say what you want about it, Twitter is a great tool especially during challenging times. Sure, there's a lot of reckless tweeting in response to any such situation, much of it quite disgusting, and there's a lot of unsubstantiated commenting, much of it fearmongering, but all that is going on everywhere, not just in the Twitterverse. For me, Twitter is a place to hear from some truly thoughtful people saying truly thoughtful things, providing helpful links and otherwise coming together to share information and ideas. It has its limits, but it's very useful, and while I'm not as avid a tweeter as many others, I like to join in, and especially today, as we were all trying to formulate our thoughts, it was a better place to post than this blog.

If you want to see what I tweeted and/or if you wish to follow me, go here (@mjwstickings). I'll just single out this one:

It's terrible what happened in #Boston, but can everyone just stop the fucking fearmongering and paranoia? Take a step back. #bostonmarathon
— Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) April 16, 2013

Okay, that's strong language, but I meant it. There has been all manner of speculation -- there were five other packages with explosives, there was a third explosion at the JFK Library, a suspect is in custody -- but really we know almost nothing beyond the obvious. I assume that law enforcement agencies, led by the FBI, know a lot more than we do and for obvious reasons aren't going public, and apparently there's something going on in the Boston suburb of Revere right now, but to me it seems irresponsible to take any of this speculation or any unsubstantiated reports seriously, even more so to participate in spreading them. This is not to say the media shouldn't be doing their job, just that there isn't much most of us can add to the story right now.

And by the way, at some point it's important to turn away, if only temporarily, from Twitter, other social media, and even most traditional news outlets (the New York Post was especially awful in its reckless and irresponsible coverage, but I found CNN's coverage lacking as well; MSNBC was fine; I didn't bother with Fox News or any of the other right-wing media outlets -- I read enough about their various transgressions on Twitter) and hear from the few news outlets that actually do their jobs really well and have the resources to provide excellent (and sober) reporting, and today, for me, that was The Boston Globe and The New York Times, as well as NBC, which aired an outstanding one-hour special from 10 to 11 hosted by Brian Williams -- really well done.

Don't get me wrong, we're all entitled to our opinions, and to sharing them. I just think we should wait before drawing conclusions -- makes sense, no? After all, it makes a huge difference whether al Qaeda or some homegrown right-wing group was being this attack -- or some other group entirely, or even a lone individual. Because right now we don't know anything -- who it was, the motive, anything.

This was a vicious attack on innocent civilians, "an assault," Derrick Jackson wrote at the Globe, "on our civic life." It took place on an important day in Boston -- the day of the marathon, Patriots' Day, a civic holiday in Massachusetts (as well as Maine). And as President Obama said, "make no mistake, we will get to the bottom of this, and we will find out who did this, we'll find out why they did this." Those responsible will "feel the full weight of justice."

That time, hopefully, will come. Fow now, let us focus on the victims and their loved ones, and on the heroic first responders and others at the scene who bravely rushed to help the victims, now knowing what else might be coming, even as our thoughts turn to the search for those behind this attack, and to the reasons for it, as we try to make sense of what seems to have been so utterly senseless.

**********

I generally do not post editorial cartoons, out of respect for the artist's right to his or her work, but I wanted to post this one, by the Globe's Dan Wasserman, which is making the rounds and which so beautifully captures the essence of this horrendous incident and the incredible response to it in Boston -- even with so much bloodshed, one can see in the response the humanity that binds us all together. Amid such ugliness, it is a truly wonderful thing.

Social media: yer doin' it rong

By Carl 

Did you know there was a Republican presidential debate last night?

Don't bother looking for repeats of it on CNN or video on YouTube. 

It was held on Twitter:

Now there's the @140townhall, hosted by the Tea Party, for a few hapless GOP 2012 candidates. 

I don't think enough attention has been paid to how terrible, asinine and embarrassing it was. It was almost funny. The only way it could possibly have been worse would have been if Romney had showed up.

To give you an idea of the level of discourse, which you can read in less time than it took the candidates to misstype, Bachmann's opening statement begins as follows: "TY for this forum. I'm running 4 POTUS 2 bring the voice of the people back to DC."

How... dignified.

Now, in truth, Twitter may be the best venue for the GOP to debate issues: 140 characters means you can't explain anything, you can't easily obfuscate, and you have to create bumper sticker answers on the fly.

Plus, as I often say, Twitter is for twits. This is perfect!

Except what's the point of having an exchange like that if no one knows about it? What's the point of having a debate if it's going to become a muddled mess of snappy answers that you can't even really be certain thread to the other participants?

You might as well ask Dickie Goodman to sample the candidates' position papers and create a "debate" that way.

This points up the contrast in how social media is used by both parties.

The blogosphere/Blogtopia (© Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo) is well-established and -- as conservatives are wont to do -- pretty bipartisanly effective well after the blog-world lost its uniqueness.

Facebook is similarly fairly familiar now, and conservatives have made inroads there as well. Sarah Palin's Facebook page is among the most popularly and most carefully watched pages on the site.

This is a far cry from not too long ago, when Rupert Murdoch purchased MySpace as an attempt to "Fox News" social media, thus abandoning hundreds of conservatives to a lonely outpost on the edges of the cybergalaxy.

Now we have Twitter. Twitter is great for alerting people: you need a quick fundraising hit, or an urgent policy announcement, you link to it on Twitter and it gets around. Twitter is great for a wiseass like me (even though I don't tweet) who can snap off one-liners.

Twitter is not great for a dialogue. And therein lies the problem for the Republicans. They bring a rubber band to a knife fight.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)