YouTube and the George Allen Video August 16, 2006
Rolling Stone has a story on their blog about YouTube's role in exposing and spreading the now infamous George Allen Listening Tour video. Here's a quote from the article:
There’s a paradigm shift under way and politicians like Allen, and to a lesser extent Joe Lieberman and Barbara Boxer, are learning it the hard way. The barriers to video broadcast are now gone. So an opposing campaign no longer has to rely on a local news station or CNN or CSPAN to run video of a gaffe. Any dolt with a handicam now can capture the unscripted reality of a candidate and disseminate it worldwide.
If it generates enough buzz in the blogosphere, the cable networks will even pick it up, as happened almost immediately with Allen’s monkeyboy dig.
All that sounds great and true. There is only one problem: didn't the Washington Post break the story after the Webb campaign released the video to reporters? I think this was more a case of the blogosphere picking up on a mainstream press story than vice versa.
Regardless, I think it's pretty much guaranteed that more citizen journalist produced videos will pop up in the next few months and potentially impact the 2006 election.
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You’re probably correct regarding the chronology of the event. However, it might be worth considering that had it not “jumped” from the traditional media into the blogosphere/YouTube realm, it might have been more easily forgotten by the public at learge. Instead, it took on a momentum that it might otherwise not have had.
Daniel,
This is absolutely a case where the blogosphere amplified/gave legs to a story that wouldn’t have legs if just reported in the mainstream press.
There are also plenty of stories that start out in the blogosphere and then end up in the mainstream press. I just don’t think this was one of them.