John Edwards and Mitt Romney have been making fascinating use of YouTube in the presidential campaign. Bob LeDrew makes a couple of equally fascinating observations about what will surely follow:
* War rooms will become expert at finding inconsistencies and getting them YouTubed;
* Inconsistencies will be torqued and played with by selective clipping;
* So many inconsistencies will be found and so many will be torqued that voters will become confused by them, immunized against them, and possibly more apathetic than before (if that’s possible)
* Services like the excellent Annenberg Political Factcheck will become even more indispensable for media and voters alike.
I do like that verb: torqued. Yes, there’ll be a lot of video torquing going on. But I don’t think video will serve only one spin or another. There will also be people just taping what candidates do and say and that will be valuable: life as C-SPAN.
