Under an Obama administration, there will be fireside chats on YouTube. That’s what Steve Grove, head of News and Politics for YouTube said the Senator told him when he visited their offices. Grove, speaking on a panel held at CNN on Wednesday for Internet Week, said one of the main differences between Senators Clinton and Obama is that the voters summoned Clinton to the web and not the other way around.
Michael Scherer of Time and Nadira Hira from Fortune also spoke at the panel moderated by David Bohrman, the Washington Bureau Chief of CNN. Bohrman and Grove collaborated on the YouTube presidential candidate debates. Bohrman said that back in the 1990’s he had a conversation with a high-level executive from Time who said that the internet would be useful only for people putting in change of address forms for subscriptions. He said, “News executives are not smart about thinking ahead.”
When it comes to the web, neither are most of the candidates. Scherer laid out the differences between the Clinton and Obama web presence as one of control versus access. Clinton had a website where you could submit a question and possibly receive a filtered answer. She would do videos, but everything was presented in a top-down format, with no question about who was in firm control. Obama has a website where you can build your own web page and it functions as social networking site. “From the beginning, his message was: This is about you—I need your help,” Scherer said. By January, the Clinton campaign realized he had an email list of one million people and could raise millions of dollars—all with small donations. Clinton saw she should have been doing this all along.
According to Scherer, Obama didn’t use the web to pander to established liberal bloggers to raise funds. Instead, he reached out to voters who rarely use it. And they signed up on line to do phone trees. Hira said young voters’ on line relationship with Obama is very real. He’s their friend on Facebook and people go to the polls for Facebook friends. Young people don’t listen to pundits on CNN or MSNBC. They talk to each other, real time, on the web.
When it comes to the differences between Republicans and Democrats, Scherer said it’s like comparing Little League to the New York Yankees. “Mitt Romney threw a lot of things at the web, but he’s a top-down kind of candidate, too,” he said. Romney had a big resistance to the YouTube debate because he didn’t want to answer questions from a “snowman.”
Grove said that now there are YouTube debates in Spain and Greece and Japanese parties have their own YouTube channels. Even Gordon Brown has Ask The PM. But while candidates are increasingly present on line, Scherer says they will be far less transparent once in the White House. “Obama is in for a wake-up call,” he said. “Powerful interests still control Washington. He’s still dependent on courting those interests. It’s going to be much harder.”
But how long can transparency, even for candidates, last? One audience member said advertisers will just learn how to manage the illusion of transparency—and that it will take the form of content that will persuade the user. Hira said “There is a difference between transparency and authenticity. Audiences will tolerate a lot of spin—if that’s what they already believe.”—Sherry Mazzocchi
I appreciate that Obama is trying to be as transparent as possible. Citizens deserve to know where their money is going and how government is being run. Obama collaborated with republican Tom Coburn to introduce new legislation known as the "The Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008."
"The new bill would build upon and improve previous efforts by Senators Obama and Coburn to provide public access to federal grant and contract information through the USASpending.gov web site. Among other things, it would require copies of each federal contract and details of the bidding process to be published online."
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2008/06/obama_introd.html
In the spirit of full disclosure: I voted for Obama in the primaries and I will be voting for him come November.
Posted by: Vanessa | June 06, 2008 at 07:22 PM