McCain is running a textbook Rovian race: fear-based, smear-based, anything goes. But it isn't working. The glitch in the well-oiled machine? The Internet.
"We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google told me. And YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for $1.65 billion, is one of the causes of its demise.
Thanks to YouTube -- and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails -- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price, or to run under-the-radar smear campaigns without being exposed.
The purpose of her blog is mostly to criticize McCain's campaign, but it does raise a few good points about the Internet's effect on fact-checking. Obama was decidedly more proactive in combating smears than McCain (the famous fightthesmears.com wisely took a page from urban legend debunking site snopes.com) and McCain's smaller presence on the web could be a significant handicap come election day, assuming that swift boat "issues" do indeed play as large a role as some believe.
It's the same general idea as before: more readers and users mean more people keeping the content producers honest. Still, there's no denying that sinister viral e-mails are using the Internet in an entirely contradictory fashion.
1 comments:
Interesting... but makes sense. The very medium that hosts some of the worst of one-sided, lying, nasty content might actually make that obsolete.
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