And now I like them less. They have a flack send me email bragging that they’ve started a Hillary death watch. Fuck Slate.
Wearing your Obama button, Jake?
: Later: OK, I’m being intemperate. The wine talking. And frustration. But I really am sick of the media efforts to do in Clinton. The lack of self-awareness about it is shocking.
I’ve been thinking what Gary Vaynerchuk says: Facebook is too slow. Twitter has spoiled me. I want a constant feed of stuff and Facebook is a trickle. It wouldn’t be at all hard to fix. Facebook should let me both increase the flow of information about my friends and to include external feeds in it (Facebook should have done Friendfeed).
I’ve been talking with lots of news organizations about following the feed model. Sometimes, I may want a packaged, prioritized presentation of news. But mostly, to quote Dave Winer, I want a river of news. Facebook did a brilliant job bringing an algorithmic presentation of a feed but now it’s falling behind in feed wars. They’d better catch up fast.
: Meanwhile, here’s ReadWriteWeb summing up various fears about feed OD and how to cure it.
Gene Lyons writes a thumping good column on Obama in the Arkansas Democrat. On the disenfranchisement of Florida and Michigan:
Democrats were outraged that, due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush vs. Gore, not all of Florida’s presidential votes counted. In 2008, advanced thinkers supporting Sen. Barack Obama have persuaded themselves that fairness dictates that none of them should count. Nor Michigan’s, either. Better that the voters of two critical swing states comprising close to 10 percent of the electorate be disenfranchised than that Obama’s inevitable nomination be delayed.
On media and Obama:
In Time, Mark Halperin provides a list of “Painful Things Hillary Clinton Knows–Or Should Know.” No. 7: “The Rev. Wright story notwithstanding, the media still wants Obama to be the nominee–and that has an impact every day.” We’ve come full circle. So confident have the Beltway media courtiers grown in their social and political status that what once was furiously denied is now boasted about. Politicians may come and go, but Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman, Tim Russert and Maureen Dowd preside over a permanent House of Lords.
On race and the election:
Meanwhile, TV pundits like CNN’s Jack Cafferty warn us that should Obama’s supporters be disappointed in their hopes, “you wouldn’t want to live in this country.” A more concise way of turning the November contest into a racial referendum can’t be imagined. Who will win that one ? Then what ?
On Obama’s race speech:
Wright peddles DVDs of his inflammatory sermons on the church Web site. Could Obama possibly imagine they’d help build that coalition that King dreamed of ? Second, what do the Obamas, Harvard Law graduates, tell their two little girls about Wright’s downright delusional contention that the United States government created the AIDS virus to exterminate African Americans ? Anybody named Clinton or Gore who sat still for something like that would be derided as an inauthentic phony patronizing black folks for political gain–a faker, a con man. Cosseted and protected all his life, Obama’s speech shows that he understands that the Rev. Wrights of this world do as much to keep blacks down as white racism does. All this selfpitying obsessing over the sorrows of history leads nowhere.
Brian Stelter has an excellent piece in today’s New York Times about young people and their different relationship with media in this campaign. As Pew has pointed out, young people especially (and people of all ages) act as conduits as much as consumers. And they expect to watch video themselves. This is also a clear example of how the peer replaces the editor. My favorite line:
Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”
You have to drop that bottle in the ocean, or no one will find it.
And this:
Rather than treating video-sharing Web sites as traditional news sources, young people use them as tools and act as editors themselves.“We’re talking about a generation that doesn’t just like seeing the video in addition to the story — they expect it,” said Danny Shea, 23, the associate media editor for The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com). “And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message.”
Now compare and contrast this with Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal, who can write clueful and clueless columns on the internet. His latest should be dropped in the latter bucket. He’s just not sure what to make of this internet thing and its impact on politics. Could be bad, could be good. Hmmmm. Web videos, especially on YouTube, are a good place to start. They have been called the death of the TV sound bite, for the way voters can experience lengthy realities without the filters of a news show constrained by time limits and commercials. The 37 minutes of Sen. Obama’s race speech quickly became one of the most widely downloaded.
Less clear is whether YouTube will be just as bad, or worse, at blurring the line between a fair point and a cheap shot than newspapers or TV ever were.
That’s he problem with columns: You have to write them even when you don’t have anything to say. I’ll wait for his next one.
:Later: TechPresident reports the ratings for the Obama race speech: More than 4million views for the speech or excerpts on YouTube.
I’ve had it with media trying to kick Hillary Clinton out of this race. It is not over. And Barack Obama has not won, not by a long shot.
Obama, just like Clinton, will depend on the super delegates to get the nomination. Obama, just like Clinton, stands virtually no chance of getting to the convention the winner from elected delegates.
Obama and his camp are speaking out of both sides of their mouth about the party’s nominating system. On the one hand, we have Nancy Pelosi and others arguing that Obama should get the lion’s share of the super delegates because he’s ahead in the popular vote — though he has just over 50 percent of it. (And here are big Clinton and Democratic donors protesting Pelosi’s early call of the election before it is over.) But the voting isn’t over yet. And that’s not how the system was designed. If we land at the convention with no clear winner, then the point of the super delegates — the legacy of the smoke-filled back room, the party’s safety valve to prevent another George McGovern — is to do what’s best for the party and to try to get a winner in November. That is the system. Not fair, you whine?
Well, there is nothing fair about disenfranchising the voters of Florida and Michigan. There is nothing fair about Obama himself arguing that, hey, that’s the system and so they shouldn’t come to the convention. There’s nothing smart about this, either, because this will surely alienate voters in two key swing states. But we have Howard (the loser) Dean to thank for that as well as Obama himself.
Go to the CNN delegate calculator and run some scenarios. If Clinton took 60 percent of the remaining vote, she’d come to the convention with 1827 delegates, Obama with 1846. With 60 percent of the super delegates, she’d get 2032, enough to win. Not possible? No, it’s not. So let’s say that Obama gets 60 percent of the votes left — also not possible; he’d get to the convention with 1961 delegates, still not a winner. Let’s be more reasonable. Let’s say Obama gets 55 percent of the remaining vote and 50 percent of the super delegates, which is about his fair share given his current votes; he still lands with 2105 delegates, not enough.
So why do I hear that it’s unfair for Clinton to rely on super delegates when Obama relies on them as well? Because there’s nothing fair in love and war, especially media love.
Why does Politico declare Clinton toast? Michael Scherer at Time.com says it’s nothing less than link-whoring. Or influence peddling. Or maybe they just hate Clinton. But they’d never admit that.
Why should anyone be calling for Clinton to drop out of the race? Obama hasn’t won. Indeed, the latest Rasmussen poll says equal numbers of voters — 22 percent in each case — say that Clinton and Obama should drop out. And, of course, we have today’s Gallup Poll saying that 28 percent of Clinton voters will switch to McCain if she does not win vs. 19 percent of Obama voters. You could say that’s not fair or it’s sour grapes — or it’s democracy.
It’s an election. Let the voters vote, all of them. It ain’t over till it’s over.
: LATER: I just got scolded in the comments for not disclosing my Clinton affiliation, though I ve done it a score of times and it should be neon-obvious in this post. But fine: I voted for Clinton and hope to have the chance to do so again. There.
By Matt Davies, via Make Them Accountable.
Tracey Ullman does a dead-on imitation of Arianna Huffington on her new show. Can’t embed it — fools — but go to this page and click the right-arrow on the videos until you see her.
: LATER: Here’s the clip, provided by Showtime:
This is what I said to Showtime in response:
But if I may suggest: You should enable people to embed it on their own. You want it to spread? That’s how it will spread. The days of marketing to get people to come to your site are past. You want your site to go to where the people are. Read today’s Brian Stelter piece in The Times. Free advice.
I just typed this while writing the book:
Before the public can learn to trust the powerful, the powerful must learn to trust the public.
