Media experts still buzzing from the election explained Saturday the importance of technology in what they said was the most memorable election they had witnessed.
Four panelists representing print and online media discussed trends in media coverage of the 2008 presidential election in the Sanford Institute of Public Policy for the annual John Fisher Zeidman Colloquium on Politics and the Press. Specifically, they focused on the implications of the growing role of technology on the relationship between the public, the media and the campaigns.
"This race featured the most change in media coverage since the advent of the T.V.," said Garrett Graff, editor-at-large at The Washingtonian and founding editor of mediabistro.com's "Fishbowl D.C."
The rest of the panelists were: Ruth Marcus, an editorial writer and columnist for The Washington Post; Mark Shields, an analyst with PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and a political columnist; and Jeff Zeleny, a New York Times correspondent who covered President-elect Barack Obama on campaign trail.
"One of the main developments of this campaign was the ubiquity of technology," Marcus said. "Nothing is off the record anymore; anytime anyone says anything, you can bet someone will record it and spread it on the Internet."
Hosted by Jay Hamilton, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, the colloquium attracted an audience of approximately 50 people, including Rep. David Price, D-N.C. The center has been hosting the event since 1984.
Although widespread technology provided people with a wealth of information, the fear of committing a gaffe forced the candidates to become highly protective of themselves around others-especially the media, panelists said.
"There's an image amongst the people that the reporters following Obama were always celebrating and popping champagne, but that's far from the truth," Zeleny said. "Obama is certainly a friendly person, but he heavily guarded himself and didn't speak with us as much as we would have preferred."
Such a demeanor hardly seemed unjustified when considering that a Web site such as YouTube.com can effectively end a promising campaign if a damaging enough clip begins to circulate, Graff said.
"I would argue that the use of YouTube was the most important development of this campaign," Graff said. "In 2004, Swift Boat Veterans [for Truth] spent about $60,000 on a defaming ad of [John] Kerry. However, with YouTube, a person uploaded a video of George Allan saying 'macaca' for free, and eliminated a man who at the time represented the next-in-line Republican nominee for the 2008 presidential race."
Such an obsession with shocking and controversial reports mirrored the progression of some media outlets as they focused less on bipartisan reporting and more on catering to specific demographics, panelists explained. Networks such as Fox News and MSNBC became reliable sources of biased reporting, as the two began to target controversial stories at the expense of a specific party, Marcus said.
"The line separating news and opinion became more blurred," she explained. "When I write an article on Sarah Palin, I receive over 300,000 views on our Web site; when I write an article on Social Security, I get around 30,000."
The panelists lamented similar trends in media coverage and the effects on the public's consumption of news.
"People can now more easily pick and choose what they want to expose themselves to instead of taking in the varying sides of an issue," Shields said. "They learn what they want to know, not necessarily what they need to know. And as a response to the coverage, we won't see another truly open campaign like we did in 2000 with [Sen.] John McCain. The cost of being open would be too great."
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