Politics in the Post-Media (Post-Press) World

Very interesting article by Ezra Klein in this month’s TAP on the whereabouts and activities of one Al Gore. Gore has been eerily right on so much since he was so wrong in running his campaign for the White House, hitting hard on the failings and dangers of the Bush Administration. But what is of additional interest is the ways in which he went about getting his message out:

On August 7, 2003, Gore headed to New York University to offer one of his first major speeches since his concession address; it was a notably prescient condemnation of the Bush administration’s later bellicosity and overreach. But more visionary than the content was the distribution method: the speech was Gore’s first -- but not his last -- offered under the auspices of the online-activism powerhouse MoveOn.org, an alliance that granted Gore a direct conduit to millions of engaged liberal activists nationwide.

“I know the word fell out of favor after the dot-com collapse,” mused Wes Boyd, founder of MoveOn.org, “but he’s doing disintermediation. He contacted us in the summer of 2003, said he wanted to give a speech, and was wondering if we’d like to sponsor it. What we lend to it is some of that disintermediation.”

Disintermediation is a big word for a type of subtraction, the sort that excludes the middleman (the “mediator”). As a dot-com term, it described producers selling directly to customers rather than working through established retail channels. In Gore’s case, it describes a public figure distributing his words directly to the public rather than working through established media outlets.

The reason Gore sought this out, as former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, Gore’s friend since 1961, told me, is that “Gore wants to make change, not be part of the distortive, stifling process of the mainstream media.” Speaking into the cameras, the former VP had learned, was like talking into one of those gag gift bullhorns -- what came out had little relation to what went in.

“Gore’s own view,” says Hundt, “is that he sighed noisily in the debate and used the wrong telephone line to ask for money and the media said these are momentous events. Meanwhile, they ignore global warming and the failure to catch Osama and the destruction of the safety net.”

So Gore sought a way to bypass the filter. Every time he gives a speech under MoveOn’s auspices, a guaranteed 3 million MoveOn members get the address blasted directly in their inboxes, where it can be read in full. From there, the speech gets e-mailed around, promoted on the blogs, passed from friend to neighbor -- what tech types call “viral marketing.” At no point in this process does a news editor or television producer decide which sound bites will be emphasized for ratings. MoveOn allows him to speak on his own terms and individuals to distribute his speeches on theirs. It’s Gore Unplugged, and everyone’s got a ticket.

Gore came to this approach the hard way, having badly used and been badly abused by the traditional political discourse and dissemination through mainstream media and press outlets (“MSM”). Gore’s methods present some fascinating scenarios for dealing with a malfunctioning MSM, but I can see significant limitations and problems with the approach.

1) Already there are signs that it is an effective means (in terms of economics and distribution) of communicating with Gore’s base, and with his target audience of already committed political activists who might be convinced by his ideas. But it is not enough to have large numbers of people agree with you or to convince large numbers of people to agree with you through the unfettered force of your ideas. This support must be translated into street-level activity (there is ample evidence that Gore’s methods can also work well as a fundraising plan). Readers have to be moved to the polls, to volunteer and to organize to operate within the mechanics of elective politics. However, there is nothing in this method that prevents a simultaneous organization and marshalling of resources and funds, provided it is directed by experienced, talented and committed political operatives. There is nothing inherent in communication within the MSM media, that would suggest those results would more readily be accessible. But given the primacy of the MSM, as of this point, the political operatives, right down to the precinct level have been brought up and fed on a diet of MSM and it will be a hard habit to break.

The rise of the Republican Right was, in part, a product of a low-tech version of the Gore approach. One of the true accomplishments of the Right was its creation of a support and information network, in the form of alliances with religious organizations, Conservative think-tanks, and direct- mail political newsletters. By the time the talk-radio, and then the politically dedicated cable news networks came online in force, the groundwork and ground soldiers were already working in place, and there was a synergistic acceleration of influence. Gore means to use the web to automate these devices, and its my sense that such an approach is more suited to Democratic and Liberal potential constituents, as the internet is the way in which these groups prefer to get their information.

2. Today’s political milieu is nothing if not increasingly polarized, and the Republican Right have been the loss leaders in producing this sorry state of affairs. The polarization among the politically active is, if anything, more severe than is widely recognized, hidden by the presence of the majority of Americans within the natural center of the political spectrum, This natural centrism is hardly surprising, given the relative peace and prosperity of American postwar society. Even so, the center has been continually losing people to the margins, as single-issue controversies, such as the Viet Nam War, Watergate, abortion and 9/11 have produced fractures at the extremities of the center. The center will not hold indefinitely, when the operatives on either margin increasingly control the process and thereby the agenda.

To the extent that Gore (or some Democrat following Gore’s – and Dean’s – approach) succeeds in making headway in the nominating stage of the coming elections, there will be a tendency to discount the views of the center, despite all the blathering on and on about swing voters. The Bush Administration is like one long demonstration of the dangers of this approach -- of catering to those who are most easily accessible to and susceptible to your message. The danger is not merely one of losing contact with or support within centrist swing voters, but more significantly – losing contact with the aggregated wisdom of so many Americans.

With the rise of talk radio and politically committed cable news, and with specialty religious-oriented “news” services, such as those run by Pat Robertson, the Rove/Bush Administration had an embarrassment of media riches, only too willing to be malleable. Many of these new media outlets, when faced with troubling realities, increasingly drifted toward ‘making stuff up’ to fit their dogma. The accountability shoe never dropped. The kitten-weak attempts by the MSM to impose traditional standards were subsumed and eventually drowned within the daily cacophony of 24/7 confrontational news. The lesson was not lost on Rove/Bush, and has been largely institutionalized in their image management (see, for example, Swift Boat Veterans). Having seen the almost magic bullet quality of a distorted new media, Rove/Bush adopted these same techniques as a kind of working White House operating procedure. Where once these methods were resorted to only in times of unexpected crisis, they were soon incorporated directly into the policy-making and policy-selling process, with incredibly disastrous real world (as opposed to MSM world) results. However effective this approach has been for Rove/Bush, in terms of gaining and consolidating power, I have no wish to see a Democratic/Liberal version play out, as the Republic might not stand further success along these lines.

3. The other glaring limitation of the Gore approach is one that Howard Dean is painfully familiar with. To the extent that you are successful, you have to eventually come to terms with the MSM. I do not see within Gore’s methods, a dependable vehicle for breaking the message out into the general public, to the center, other than at last submitting to the traditional paddling gauntlet that is the MSM. From Gore’s perspective, there is less to lose than might be expected. The MSM is already pre-disposed to undermine Gore, just as it was throughout his campaign, and throughout Dean’s abortive run, and Kerry’s run, and more recently, the initial forays onto the national stage by Mark Warner. The MSM’s hostility will be even more pronounced, if they have been effectively cut out of the nominating process. But to what net effect? A more overtly hostile MSM might be less damaging in the near term, as part of the deadly impact of a biased MSM on Democrats recently has been that the attacks have been below the surface and under the guise of an ‘independent’ and ‘balanced’ MSM. Why not have at it, out in the open? Draw them out from under their cover, where their prejudices and compromised interests will be transparent, no matter the news ad campaign sloganeering. Gore’s approach is premised on an intelligent and ultimately independent electorate, if only he can be heard clearly enough.

I don’t expect the MSM to sit idly by and remain in a purely reactive posture. There have been a series of MSM articles and reports that reflect the first instinct of the MSM is to strike back at the upstart alternatives and at candidates that associate with them (the rapid take-down of Dean). You can see the MSM push-back in the deafening non-coverage of most of Gore’s major addresses during this period. Say what you want about Gore, but he is a former Vice President of the United States, and a well-informed one at that. Yet his blistering critiques on the Rove/Bush Administration’s environmental, civil liberties, and foreign policy debacles were all but ignored by the MSM (they preferred to run soft-focus pieces on how there were no strong voices within the Democratic Party).

But MSM is also busily and manically trying to co-opt the new process, with tepid results so far. Fox News is not suited to adaptation (although Murdoch is famously a political and commercial realist when it suits him), so it is not surprising to see their institutional hostility to new and independent outlets. Fox News is surprisingly calcified for a relatively young institution, so the strain from seismic shifting is starting to show within the rigors of the Fox Mindset. Nicholas Lemann has a hilarious but astute profile of Papa Bear O’Reilly in this week’s New Yorker (his description of O’Reilly’s forgotten novel “Those Who Trespass” makes me want to rush out to B&N tomorrow). Lemann makes this observation of the evolution of the O’Reilly Factor:

. . . . you’ll be surprised by how little of the content these days is political. “The O’Reilly Factor” is, increasingly, not a conservative show but a cop show—“O’Reilly: Special Victims Unit,” perhaps—devoted particularly to sex offenders; the host, in effect, is Shannon Michaels playing Tommy O’Malley. Once, when Howard Stern was asked to explain his success, he said that he owed it to lesbians. O’Reilly owes his to child molesters.

I won’t pretend to be a faithful Fox News watcher (shudder), but if ever you go out to lunch in a restaurant, diner or delicatessen, almost certainly you will be subjected to daytime spectacle of Fox News on the establishments’ large-screen televisions. At first, I expected to be confronted by hard news, Fox style (for hardheads), but what I have most often seen is America’s Greatest Police Chases and afternoon talk-show host, audience participation format shows about some lurid, not even marginal outrage (it’s like angry, amped-up Sally Jessie Raphaels have taken over). Fox personnel still affect the high-intensity, high-volume barking delivery, but what I am hearing (after the ringing in my ears quiets down) is the sound of politics passing them by. The more traditionally Aussie Tabloid format and subject matter is what sells these days.

So it is within the realm of possibility that the Gore approach could result in a change in the hard-wired-against dynamics of MSM coverage, at least over the long haul. In the pre-war era, the print media dominated political coverage. FDR rose to power and transformed America’s fortunes in the face of overwhelming editorial opposition. Radio was his secret weapon.