Re-thinking Mayhill Fowler

Yesterday, while blogging about bittergate (on a slightly different note, my favourite comment on any message board so far during this whole saga was something along the lines of: "why do we persist in adding "gate" to every little problem facing a politician. It's a frickin' hotel, for godsake!") I made an observation about the role of the Huffington Post Citizen journalist Mayhill Fowler:

[T]he whole sequence of events illustrates a problem for modern campaigns - Mayhill Fowler is not a Washington press corp reporter. She is a private citizen, a mother, a retired teacher who gave up work to bring up her family. In short: no campaign is ever going to see her coming or know if there is a Mayhill Fowler in the room. She simply bought a ticket for the fundraiser and recorded it.

Actually, it seems that wasn't true at all, and is hardly a fair characterisation of the relationship which Fowler had with the Obama campaign. The truth is rather more interesting, and raises some really interesting questions about the role citizen journalists could (or should) play in political campaigns and how the fruits of their labours should be understood by readers. According to a great article on Realclearpolitics, Obama campaign workers freely admit that they were blind-sided by Fowler writing the story and they certainly didn't suspect that she would be taping the fundraiser. However, the reason for this wasn't because she had crept in off the street while no one was looking.

The campaign is wisely staying out of the business of publicly expressing dismay about an activist blogger supporter publishing material on a very high-profile new media news and opinion outlet that is taken from a private event to which the press was not allowed. (I asked to attend the event and was told it was "private, off the record, and closed to the press.") But Obama campaign sources say privately that they are furious with the situation.

They had a different expectation of Fowler. For the past year, the 61-year old Vassar graduate, wife of a wealthy Bay Area attorney, has hung around with people in the Obama campaign and traveled to several states, blogging all the while about her experiences and perceptions of the campaign and candidate. She was seen as an opinionated activist blogger, a supporter, someone who had a tendency at times to lecture the campaign in her copy but was ultimately an enthusiast. She was not viewed as a journalist.

So exactly what was Fowler? A journalist? An activist? An interested citizen? This isn't to say she shouldn't have reported what she did (in fact, I think it would have been rather less morally justifiable had the story been spiked by a long term Obama supporter who has given his campaign a lot of money to boot). However, it is quite clearly the case that there are, as a perceptive article in today's Guardian by Michael Tomasky notes, huge tensions between the notions of the citizen and of the journalist.

The end result of this tension - and the scandals it will surely continue to generate - may well mean that the access bloggers have to come to enjoy becomes far more restricted in the future.

Gaffes in the age of the Internet

It is far too early to tell yet and the odds remain long, but if bittergate does play a decisive role in the either the remaining period of the Democratic primary contest or the Presidential election, it might have a good claim to be the single most important Internet-related political event thus far recorded. For those not in the know, the whole thing started with a story on the Huffington Post blog, written by Mayhill Fowler featured comments made by Obama at a San Francisco fundraiser on April 6th.

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The story is interesting on a number of levels, as it shines a light on the huge role the Internet is now playing in American political campaigns. The first thing to note is the source - the Huffington Post. Ironically, this has been one of the most pro-Obama blogs out there over the course of the election, so that the quote emerged there is particularly ironic (it should also be noted that Arianna Huffington has already penned a defence of Obama, and accused Clinton of dirty politics on the issue). But the whole sequence of events illustrates a problem for modern campaigns - Mayhill Fowler is not a Washington press corp reporter. She is a private citizen, a mother, a retired teacher who gave up work to bring up her family. In short: no campaign is ever going to see her coming or know if there is a Mayhill Fowler in the room. She simply bought a ticket for the fundraiser and recorded it. 

Then the whole event plays out in the blogosphere, as much as in the TV media. The issue may may be about a particular matter, but the narrative is very familiar. The pro-Obama Daily Kos, for example, carries a piece on its frontpage accusing the mainstream media of focusing on triviality. In contrast, the conservative Townhall site is littered with hatchet pieces based on the quote. Reading the comments that follow on both sites, it really is easy to believe that Cass Sunstein had a point about the Balkanisation of discussion on the web (although my award for piece of the day goes to Bill Krystol's - this one, not this one - New York Times piece, which implies that Barack Obama is some kind of revolutionary Marxist).

Another interesting Internet angle is how campaigns try to turn these events to their advantage. Apparently John McCain is already trying to fundraise on the back of the comments. Most interesting of all perhaps is the email sent out by David Plouffe, Barack Obama's campaign manager. In it he says:

You've probably heard about the latest dust-up in the Democratic race.

A few days ago, Barack spoke about the frustrations that working people in this country are feeling and said what we all know is true: that many people are bitter and angry because they believe their government isn't listening to them.

You and I both know that the hope of changing that reality is what drives the unprecedented support for this campaign from ordinary people in every part of the country.

But our opponents have been spinning the media and peddling fake outrage around the clock. John McCain's campaign, which will continue the George Bush economic policies that have devastated the middle class, called Barack out of touch and elitist. And Hillary Clinton, who is the candidate who said lobbyists represent real people, didn't just echo the Republican candidate's talking points: she actually used the very same words to pile on with more attacks...

If you can support the campaign at this crucial moment, you'll be able to share your story about why you're committed to this campaign.

Two things are going on here. Firstly, the Obama camp are using their email list to disseminate what seems to have become their standard fire fighting spin. They are focusing on the bitter angle of the comments (as in "Barack spoke about the frustrations that working people in this country are feeling and said what we all know is true"), rather than the potentially much more damaging observations about faith, gun ownership and anti-immigrant feeling. Indeed, it might be argued that the branding of the whole affair as bittergate represents a good first step on the road to recovery from the gaffe for the Obama camp. They are also trying to tie the issue in with their existing campaign themes, in particular on corporate power and lobbying.

Secondly, they are trying to turn the event into a fundraising opportunity, wherein they can whip up their supporters to donate on the back of a perceived injustice committed against their candidate (see the above cited Daily Kos post for the evidence of this feeling). Given this election has been going on so long, and people are now firmly divided into the Clinton and Obama supporters (and are also thus predisposed to seeing the election in certain ways that favour their preferred candidate), so both candidates have a network of supporters they can tap into in this way.

Never Gonna Give You Up

I love this story. Some of you may remember the 80s pop star Rick Astley, whose song Never Gonna Give You Up was the biggest hit of 1987. However, and although he had a few hits afterwards, Astley's career as a major recording artist was pretty much over by the early nineties. And it seemed fairly unlikely that he would ever figure in popular culture again. However, that was before the concept of rickrolling was invented...

According to Wikipedia: 

Rickrolling is a prank and Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give You Up. In a rickroll, a person provides a link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand which actually takes the user to the Astley video. It can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive. A person who falls for the prank is said to be rickrolled.

The rickrollers have already persuaded fifteen million people to watch various YouTube videos of Never Gonna Give You Up (six million times for this video and nine million for this one) by placing dummy links all over the web. But they have just pulled off their greatest coup by stitching up the New York Mets.

The Mets were holding a vote to decide on a club song. They were clearly expecting fans to vote for a solid American, Bon Jovi-type classic. However, as soon as the vote appeared on the site, the rickrolling machine swung into action, using social networking and bookmarking sites to mobilise support for Astley. There was no contest - Never Gonna Give You Up ran away with the competition with five million votes.

Displaying a lack of good sportsmanship (and certainly the lack of a good sense of humour) the Mets were actually quite peeved by the whole thing and have vowed to set aside the results of the online vote and replace with a decision made by fans in the Shea Stadium. But still, it was a very good joke.   

I'll leave the last word to the man himself.

Bridging divides

ggate3_3.jpgI am just back from the International Studies Association annual convention in San Francisco. The theme of the conference was ‘Bridging Multiple Divides’ – divides between academics, policymakers and activists, and divides within academia between different theoretical and methodological approaches to studying international politics. Of the 4,000+ presentations on offer, for me one of the more entertaining panels challenged the idea that bridging divides is necessarily a good thing. This struck a chord: at a convention a few years back I recall an ISA president calling for academics to speak with ‘one voice’ to policymakers, since that would make things easier for government.

The ‘Why Bridge It?’ panel, organised by the LSE’s Millennium: Journal of International Studies, challenged ISA’s notion that divides should or could be reconciled. They did so simply by examining what bridges are. This might seem incredibly flippant. Building bridges signals humankind’s mastery of nature, argued Douglas Bulloch, and in films like A Bridge Too Far or Bridge Over the River Kwai, our hubris. Bridges signal conflict too: to destroy a bridge appears hugely symbolic in the case of Mostar during the 1990s Balkans conflicts or the al-Sarafiya Bridge in Baghdad more recently. Bridges are a site of battle, noted Henry Radice, where the loser is thrown off the side, or a point of restricted passage if a bridge is gated or guarded. To those deliberately on marginal islands, bridge-building connects them to the mainstream or mainland, perhaps against their wish to be undisturbed. A bridged divide is no longer a divide. Bridges may have utility, but they do violence! Does ISA’s inclusiveness signal violence?

But if we examine the so-called marginal voices in international studies – the post-structuralists, post-modernists and critical theorists – they are as well-represented as the mainstream; they are mainstream now. The truly marginal wouldn’t be at ISA in the first place. Felix Berenskoetter suggested that those at the margin take a position of superiority, the self-appointed cutting edge, closer to a higher truth. They do not need a bridge built to them or to build bridges themselves. They sit under a bridge and leap out to attack the traffic now and again.

Forgive a final stretch of metaphor. There is only land and water, for Heidegger, two substances. A bridge assumes a space between islands, but we focus on how the bridge transforms how we think of the islands (Oliver Kessler and Robert Kissack). There are images of bridges on Euro banknotes to represent communication between the peoples of members states and to suggest a coming-together of identity. But what is the in-between? What is in the divide? Who or what is the water? Politics? At this point, Robert’s opening comment that the Golden Gate Bridge is the most popular suicide destination in the world began to hit home.

Wiki wars

I don't normally use the blog just to flag up articles, but this is a particularly good one from The National Review on the online defenders of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Wikipedia (just a word of warning - the language gets a bit fruity at points).

Is this the most successful long political YouTube clip ever?

Barack Obama's speech on race earlier this week has been playing absolutely huge in the media in the US (for a good list of stories on the subject, check out Real Clear Politics). As would be expected, the Obama campaign immediately uploaded the whole video - some thirty seven minutes of it - onto YouTube. It has now been watched more than 200,000 times.  

I have to confess, the success of the video has surprised me a bit. I had completely bought into the logic that YouTube was a pop corn medium - light, fluffy and not very filling. Most successful political videos (or videos full-stop, in fact) on YouTube are a couple of minutes long at most. But here is a speech of nearly forty minutes, delivered direct to camera, that has been accessed by thousands and thousands of people in only a few days. I still suspect the general rule holds, but if nothing else, it illustrates what an unusual election cycle this is and how Barack Obama's candidacy has caught the public's imagination.

(My take on the content of the speech is on my personal weblog, here).  

Comparing messages across different political communication environments (from the Ohio State University IWG meeting)

Just finished an interesting day at the latest gathering of the International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policymaking at the Ohio State University's fabulous Barrister Club. Thanks to the Moritz College of Law and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies for sponsoring the event and to the Moritz law students who have looked after us so well.

My paper on 'Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy' (picture below) was first up at 9am, though with jet lag it felt like lunchtime (perhaps the only advantage of jet lag). Thanks to Vince Price (Annenberg School, Penn) for his thoughtful and stimulating discussant comments.

IWG_OSU_March_2008.jpg 

Lots of interesting papers throughout the day and too much to blog about, but I was particularly struck by a discussion right at the end of the session, when participants were commenting on Alicia Schatteman's paper. Alicia is a PhD student at Rutgers University whose dissertation is examining the case of Ontario's Assembly on Electoral Reform.

In the discussion that followed, David Lazer (Kennedy School, Harvard) raised an interesting point about how Alicia's case presented a useful opportunity to consider how communication environments differ and how this might impact political outcomes. So, in the case of the Ontario Assembly there were face to face small group deliberations supported by expert input, a supporting website with rich sources of information and a full record of discussions, and then there was the broader 'mass media' environment and the political campaigning element which involved the political parties, journalists and so on.

The advantage of Alicia's case is that it allows us to compare a single issue - in this case electoral reform - across these very different media ecosystems. An intriguing point here is the extent to which organised party opinion and media management came into play in the mass media environment but was a less powerful force in the small group deliberations. The interactions between these environments, including how what goes on in one gets represented in the others, is also of significance.

It strikes me that this might be a fruitful way of approaching the communication processes surrounding specific policy issues.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

Or, in English, the word of the people is the word of God. But just occassionally, you see a reason to doubt the wisdom of this view. I was surfing the Fix blog this morning (the same website that recently proved itself so collectively wise), I found an absolute crackerjack of a comment that completely brightened my day and which I just had to share:

"I think it's time for Hillary Clinton to fold up her tent and go home. Her campaign can be described in one word - low class."

Mixed messages for citizen journalists

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I was watching BBC News 24 today, following the progress of a rather large storm that has hit the UK. Although it wasn't too bad inland (pretty breezy though) it coincided with the spring high tides, so had a very dramatic impact on the coast. It occurred to me that the news media were sending out rather mixed messages. On the one hand, they were leading out earnest spokesperson after earnest spokesperson advising the British public that they should stay in doors and on no account go close to the sea, due to the danger posed by wind and waves.

However, this was immediately followed by the newscasters begging viewers to send in their own photos and videos of the storm. The problem was that some of the pieces of citizen journalism the BBC then went onto show could not have been taken at a safe distance from the coastline. Although the BBC does have a page which advises people "not to take unnecessary risks". The very fact that broadcasters choose to use such items sends out some pretty mixed messages.