In Politics, the Gaffe Goes Viral

Sen Hillary Clinton's strategy seems to be to hold up Sen Barack Obama just short of the finish line and Sen Obama, a rookie to national politics, would make a mistake and a bored, crabby national press corps would pounce. Based on the debate that ran on ABC last week, it just might work. And while it’s tempting to blame ABC, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos for the focus on lapel pins, “bitter” remarks and faint ties to the Weather Underground — and we will blame them soon — the news media’s values haven’t really changed. The nature of campaigns has. Gaffes now enter a supercharged ecosystem of cable, bloggers and digitally enabled mainstream media outlets. A slip of the tongue — or a clear view into a candidate’s soul, depending on your politics — can be game-changing because there are so many other people covering the game in so many ways. And nothing is more viral than a screw-up. Witness the uproar after Sen Obama’s remarks about “bitter” voters finding succor in God, guns and great big fences. Sen Obama was speaking at a small fund-raiser in San Francisco to a group of supporters in an event everyone assumed was off the record. Well, not everybody. As it turned out, the media member who threw Sen Obama under the bus was never really on it. Mayhill Fowler, a blogger for Off the Bus, the joint effort between the Huffington Post and Jay Rosen, a journalism professor (and Obama supporter), reported out his remarks from the fund-raiser. After she reluctantly posted a remark that she knew would feed her candidate into a digital wood-chipper, rapid-fire linking was followed by umbrage-filled analytics. Thus, another cable news controversy was born.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21carr.html?ref=todaysp...
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A Volatile Election Campaign All in One Place
A look at Time magazine's "the Page" and senior political analyst Mark Halperin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21halperin.html?ref=tod...
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