It really feels at the moment that Web 2.0 is coming into to its own and the long tail is impacting on the conduct of politics and issues of the day - particularly through something like youtube and other
distributions of media produced outside the economic constraints of the mass market. Here are three good examples:
1) Racist chanting at football games - in English football it has long been the case that fans of Tottenham Hotspur have had to put up with racist anti-semitic chanting from other fans because of the club's historical and cultural Jewish connections. And nothing has ever been done about it by the authorities, except last week when Tottenham beat West Ham in the EPL people at the game recorded racist chanting by West Ham fans and posted them on youtube allowing supporter groups to use them as evidence in a complaint. West Ham are now being investigated by the police.
2) The "flip flopping" of Senator John McCain - Even taking into consideration the ability of any film maker to spin, distort and exaggerate, good grief, this video of McCain's apparent inability to be consistent on a number of subjects looks very bad. All election candidates prone to "flip flopping" should watch this video and be afraid, very afraid:
3) "fair and balanced" (sic) Fox News' attacks on Barack Obama - Bravenewfilms productions on youtube includes the following video detailing what appears to be a concerted campaign by Fox News to damage Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Obama. The people can fight back against mass media that plays fast and loose with the truth:
Obama isn't even really facing the full blown agression of Faux News yet.
I took part in the Democratic campaign for 2004 in Ohio so saw first hand the activity that the Conservative Right use in the elections. My first time round I felt a nauseating similarity to tactics I had seen in history lessons about the Nazi's. It restored a lot of my faith in the American electorate that Bush won by such a small margin (and that in many ways due to their flawed electoral college system) and that in the next election Bush was rejected.
However Fox (Faux) news is definately worrying. Blairs association with Murdoch is pretty vile when you consider what he is doing in America. Can't wait till the evil old man (Murdoch not dear old Tony) dies and his brats hopefully tear his company apart.
Posted by: Martin Bentley | March 07, 2007 at 10:28 PM