Lightman's piece in today's Hartford Courant on campaign videos, independent YouTube videos and the role blogs are playing now is a surprisingly positive look at how citizen driven media and the viral distribution of video is influencing politics. Lightman interviews a number of blogger experts including Matt Stoller and Joshua Levy. Remarkably the article fails to mention the Ned Lamont campaign and the Nedheads work on YouTube.
Our pal Jane Hamsher has a great take on the role blogs are playing in influencing the Democratic nominee and the distance that still exists between the grassroots power of the blogs and the message control of big name candidates.
Among liberal bloggers, for instance, there's still uncertainty about who's the favorite.
"Do I think we set much of the agenda?" asked Jane Hamsher, a Middletown author who founded the liberal blog firedoglake.com. "Well, I don't think Hillary really needs us, she just needs us not to be against her.
"Likewise Obama. I do think there are other candidates to whom our support could be more critical," she said.
"Right now there is a pervasive `wait and see' attitude, a desire to see how things shake out before committing one way or another," she said. "It's a long time until November 2008."
I think this is a very sober, sharp analysis of the role blogs are can play in this election. Our impact can only be negative on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but could fuel a grassroots insurgency for other candidates (Edwards, Richardson, and Dodd come to mind).
There's no need to fetishize the blogosphere and Lightman's piece strikes a balance between recognizing some very compelling aspects of campaigning online and the drawbacks that go with it. It's not surprising that Lightman's understanding is slightly disjointed and clunky -- he is a dead-tree journalist after all -- but on whole, this is a pretty good piece.
MLN is powered by