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23 September 2008
Scholar Discusses New Media in 2008 U.S. Political Campaign
Ask America webchat transcript, September 23
David D. Perlmutter is a professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas. He is the author or editor of seven books on political communication and persuasion and has most recently published Blogwars: The New Political Battleground, which describes the growing impact of bloggers on elections. He discussed new media in the 2008 U.S. political campaign in a September 23 Ask America webchat.
Following is the transcript:
(begin transcript)
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Bureau of International Information Programs
Ask America Webchat Transcript
The New Media Landscape in Campaign 2008
Guest: David Perlmutter
Date: September 23, 2008
Time: 10 a.m. EDT (14:00 GMT)
Webchat Moderator: We are about to begin. We will post some comments from Dr. Perlmutter and then begin with your questions.
David Perlmutter: Through the use of blogs and other OSIM, Barack Obama was able to gain a decisive edge in fundraising and appeal to youth voters to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
• All major American political candidates and campaigns are extensively creating OSIM and both employing OSIM professionals and reaching out to independent bloggers.
• Many people are creating their own political Web sites to self-organize on behalf of candidates and causes.
• Military bloggers (milbloggers) have affected perceptions of the Iraq war in the United States and thus affected its political role in the election.
• Most major media organizations, especially those concerned with politics, are "blogging up," asking their correspondents and editorialists to start blogs and hiring bloggers.
• Citizen journalism has redefined all of journalism, especially in politics. The proverbial "first draft of history" is no longer written or pictured by news professionals but often by ordinary citizens on the scene of news events, from the South Asia tsunami to the London bombings.
• The cell phone and the pocket digital camera have affected political discourse. Politicians never know who in a crowd might be videoing them.
• MySpace and Facebook have become significant loci for political argumentation and organization.
• YouTube is now the world's "network of record." People go to it to see breaking news and upload their own "I-reports."
Webchat Moderator: And now we are taking your questions.
Question [ruediger brandt]: Internet, blogs, chats are more and more important in the political campaign. Question: how important is the internet for this race between Obama and McCain? And: how long will it take 'till traditional information will be perhaps completely needless?
Answer [David Perlmutter]: a. very important. In the primaries and caucuses, Obama was able to gain a large share of the youth vote and gain a decisive fundraising edge because of his use of new media. Right now, polls show that he has more younger voters more excited about his candidacy. The Internet is also playing a very important role in disseminating information, especially videos and rumors about each candidate. Also, many people are organizing themselves into interest groups via online media.
b. I doubt that will ever happen, or at least not for many years. The success of the Obama campaign shows that you must be very skilled at all the traditional techniques, from voter canvassing to "get out the vote," as well as employment of the new media.
Q [klippstaetter]: What will be the estimated turnout at this years election? And what portion of that turnout will be related to new media?
A [David Perlmutter]: It is difficult at this point to give an exact number, but we have some hints that we are going to have a very strong turnout across the country.
First, the television ratings for candidate debates during the nominating process were very high, as were the ratings for the nominee convention speeches.
Second, at least in the Democratic party, there was a lot of excitement and high turnouts for primaries and caucuses. Republican turnout was lower, but the nomination of Sarah Palin (and attacks on her by the left) are exciting many Republicans and conservatives. You will see astoundingly high ratings for the television debates. It is hard to gauge which voters will be driven only by the Internet. The key number will probably be the youth vote; will it be much higher this year than in previous years? We won't know that until election day. We do know that people who use online media for political information tend to vote at a higher rate than the general population.
Q [Martin Wagner]: What is OSIM?
A [David Perlmutter]: Online social/interactive media. These are media that exist on and through the Internet and allow users to interact with each other and even build larger communities, often with common interests and concerns.
Q [Marc Hennekes]: Good afternoon. As you seem to be taking questions now, here is mine: Do online media lie more than traditional newspapers? Or, in other words: Who should we trust?
A [David Perlmutter]: I don't think we can make a sweeping statement that, for example, traditional newspapers are always accurate and independent bloggers are always wrong. You have to look at the individual source, especially their record of factual accuracy over time, as well as their record of how they deal with errors. Traditional media tend to have many layers of editorial scrutiny, so naturally they might be more likely to get facts right. However, many people who read blogs, especially very good, well-researched blogs, note that these excellent bloggers are much more likely to admit a mistake, display the new, corrected answer prominently, and work hard to avoid repeating the error. There is in fact today a crisis of authority. Whom can we trust on the Internet? As I said, I think all of us must play the role of skeptical consumer, whether we are reading Der Spiegel, the New York Times, DailyKos, RedState, or my blog (http://www.policybyblog.squarespace.com).
Q [Raimund Lammersdorf]: Given the overwhelming mass of blogs and other political information on the web: do you think that we can expect a consolidation that would winnow down the number of blogs etc. to a manageable few?
Webchat Moderator: The next answer will appear shortly. You can download the PPT slide displayed below. See the download POD in the lower right corner to download a biography of today's speaker.
A [David Perlmutter]: Yes and no. First, consolidation is going on, where now there are many superblogs, especially in politics--like for example DailyKos (on the left) and TownHall (on the right)--that draw millions of readers. On the other hand, there are millions of tiny blogs that draw very small numbers of viewers. Many of the smaller bloggers give up after a short time, in part because of the hard work blogging entails every day, or disappointment at not reaching a larger audience. The Wild West days (read Karl May!) of OSIM are over. It is probably much more likely that a new blogger can break in by specializing; that is, not having a blog that covers all topics but just one topic, such as "American relations with Germany" or "nuclear power." You will definitely see large media companies trying to buy out large blogs as well.
Q [Dorothea 2]: How does voter canvassing work in the Internet?
A [David Perlmutter]: In traditional voter canvassing, volunteers (or paid campaign staff) go door-to-door to people's homes or call them on the phone, and see if they are registered to vote or offer them voting information materials. Many times the canvassers work from lists of likely voters. On the Internet, you cannot just send out blast e-mails, but you can start to build contact lists. You buy those lists and you build up contacts through your Web sites. Barack Obama's text message about his vice presidential choice was one way to build up a contact list. At that point, you need to send out messages giving people information about the campaign, soliciting funds, or asking them to take some other actions. Of course, nearer election day, you urge them to vote. The best campaigns realize that you can't just do face-to-face or just do online; you must do both.
Webchat Moderator: If you are just joining us, welcome! Dr. Perlmutter is taking your questions now.
Q [Razannamanana Marie Jeanne]: Do you think that you tube and blogs give the necessary information like TV, Newspaper, Media in general?
A [David Perlmutter]: The decisive advantage of online is the fact that it can be instant, interactive, globally accessible and always on. It used to take days, even weeks, to prepare a campaign commercial, buy television time, and have it broadcast. In contrast, I have a student who is working on the John McCain campaign doing Web videos; he can cut one within hours, post it on YouTube, and it will get 2 million hits within a day. In other words, campaigns have had to adjust to having a highly compressed schedule to create political information and respond to it. Everything is faster and more frantic than ever before. Also, as I said in my opening remarks, politicians are now aware that everyone in an audience is also a potential journalist, with their cell phone or pocket camera.
Q [klippstaetter]: Is there a difference between the two parties in using the new media?
A [David Perlmutter]: In politics as in war, the party that out of power is often more likely to embrace technological innovations and new strategies and tactics. I think of the example of Germany before WWII, when it was much more open to exploiting tanks and rockets than the winners of the First World War. In America, from about 2000 to 2006, the left/Democrats were out of power, and I think that they were much more likely to leap into the new OSIM. Right now most people agree that many parts of online politics tend to be dominated by the left. But Republicans and conservatives are also present in great numbers, and I think this election is energizing them to try to catch up.
Q [Ali Eid Cairo IRC]: How the advanced technologies in communication help increase the political participation? Greetings from Cairo!
A [David Perlmutter]: For many people, going online is the easiest way to get information about politics, campaigns and elections. In addition, surveys have shown that people who use the Internet a great deal for gathering political information and expressing themselves politically are also people who engage in other political activities such as giving money to a candidate and voting. Politicians realize this, and that is why, among other reasons, so much attention is being focused on "online political citizens." That said, we should also understand that in the United States, older people, who are less likely to be heavy political Internet users, also vote at a high rate.
Q [Martin Wagner]: Isn't blogging like preaching to your own community, which means you just reach people who are likeminded, be it on the left or right?
A [David Perlmutter]: Yes, in part. Studies of blogging preferences among people who have partisan political leanings that I have conducted as well as research by others show that, for example, leftwing bloggers do tend to read leftwing blogs. However, a key intervening variable is that most blogs, no matter how partisan they are, will include hyperlinks even to the enemy. So at least the public has a much greater chance of exposing themselves to opposing views through blog reading than they would reading a partisan newspaper or book. Most good political bloggers that I have interviewed extensively read their counterparts on the opposite sides. Also, blogposts will be picked up by the general media and quoted or repeated, so that everyone will see them, not just the original partisan blog audience.
Q [venkateshk]: Dr Perlmutter, can you give us a figure on the number of internet users who read political bloggers in the US?
A [David Perlmutter]: The numbers vary depending on your definition of "blog reader." For example, do we mean someone who reads blogs every day like they would a newspaper, or just is driven to look at blogs when a major event or issue pops up? The estimate I believe is reasonably accurate is that about 1/5 of Internet users use blogs in part as sources of information about politics, campaigns and elections.
Q [klippstaetter]: Is there still the big difference between modern high-tech communication before the election and when the voters go to the polling-station they feel like being sent back to the middle ages? In other words has the polling-systems caught up with civilization?
A [David Perlmutter]: Some people think that our modern voting system is too modern. At least in the days where people marked squares on a piece of paper with ink you had a solid and unambiguous record of the votes. Yes, there was corruption, but there were no technology failures! You can read many stories in the news in the U.S. about the problems with the software of high-tech voting machines. In some places, they have been withdrawn and people are returning to paper ballots. As we all know, just because something is new does not mean it is better.
Q [Dorothea]: Is there a difference between Vloggers and YouTubers?
A [David Perlmutter]: As I mention in my book BLOGWARS, (and see above) when we look at actual surveys we find that bloggers may be high in number but tend to come from the higher education and upper income portions of the population, which is as true in Kyrgyzstan or Nigeria as it is in the United States.
In the United States, bloggers are overwhelmingly white, and the majority are male. One study of 2006: “Internet seekers" of political information found them to be much more likely to have an "annual household income $75K or more" and be "post-grads." Another international survey found that in all nations, save Poland and Japan, blog readers were more often males than females.
Similarly, a report on Americans' use of technology issued by Forrester Research in summer 2005 found the country almost evenly divided between "tech optimists" (those who eagerly seek out technology to facilitate their lives and solve perceived problems) and "tech pessimists" (those who are skeptical about new technologies and find them less relevant to them less relevant to their daily lives). Tech optimists tend to be younger, higher income, are much more likely to use the Internet, and spend almost double the hours of tech pessimists online. Strikingly, 78 percent of tech optimists reported reading blogs regularly, but only 6 percent of tech pessimists reported regular blog use. YouTubers, on the other hand, tend to include a lot of much younger people: children, teenagers, college students. Many people both blog and YouTube, or use one or the other for one or the other.
Q [Raimund Lammersdorf]: The blogosphere exists as written text as opposed to the visual content of TV news programs. What effects, if any, do you think this return to the text has on the political discourse?
A [David Perlmutter]: First, yes, blog posting is dominated by text, but there are also many uses of still images, cartoons, and embedded video. In fact, as the technology improves, Internet access speeds increase, I think you will see more integrating of video and text. As a teacher, I think that the blog format (short, casual, personal) has profoundly affected (or perhaps infected) the way young people express themselves in writing. I think they find it very hard to write a long essay, do extensive library research, or even read a long book. This is part of a greater trend related to many other aspects of their lives, from movies to video games to text messaging, but in a way you could say that blogging has restored "the word" into culture while also changing our concept of what is "a text." As a lover of books, I have to admit that this frightens and saddens me. Will anyone ever read Schiller or Trollope again?
David Perlmutter: I do not think "old media" will die very soon. In my book I talk about one major event that confirmed that the old and new media were building upon each other. There was a July 2007 debate among Democratic presidential hopefuls. Broadcast on CNN, the interchange featured questions selected from about 3,000 videos submitted via the mega videolog YouTube. One of the younger respondents was a student at my university who described himself as "floored" when he saw his 27-second video on television. His query was directed at Senators Clinton and Obama and dealt with the race and gender issues of the election . . . but that's not the whole story.
Jordan Williams, 20, told our local paper that he was "a little bit dismayed when Sen. Obama made a joke. . . . But they didn't answer the question, so I was immediately a little annoyed." Indeed, but Williams, a member of the Campus Young Democrats organization, expressed his continuing interest in following political news and being a good "citizen." He added: "I just think it's very important. Some people care about what Lindsay Lohan's doing on the weekend, and I like to care about what speech [John] Edwards recently gave."
Blogging, thus, is a means, not an end, to a new political culture, but its possibilities and promises are so great that all of us—scholars, professionals, amateurs, and anyone who cares about the future of American politics and the future of America—should become part of the conversation. If you consider this book to be a long blogpost, realize that it is incomplete without the thread of comments that the best blogging incites. I hope that process can begin now. In politics and media technology, although the future is uncertain, it will not go unblogged.
Webchat Moderator: We are going to post some related links:
• "U.S. Elections 2008: The Digital Campaign":
http://munich.usconsulate.gov/election_conference_invite.pdf
• David Perlmutter's bio and blog: http://policybyblog.squarespace.com/welcome/
• Bayerischer Rundfunk conference blog: www.br-online.de/usa08
Webchat Moderator: Thank you so much for joining us.
Martin Wagner: See you in Munich!
Webchat Moderator: The webchat is now closed. Thanks again to everyone who participated!
(Speakers are chosen for their expertise and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of State.)
(end transcript)
