Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman discusses technology’s impact on politics and journalism
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Howard Fineman, left, Annenberg Dean Michael X. Delli Carpini
The tremendous impact of technology on political reporting can be traced to specific moments in time.
That message was delivered by Howard Fineman, most recently the senior Washington correspondent for Newsweek magazine, and now a writer for The Huffington Post. Mr. Fineman spoke at the Annenberg School for Communication on Monday, Oct. 27 in the first of three lectures on how technology is changing politics and political reporting.
A veteran of writing for the web – he was first writing online stories in the late 1990’s – Mr. Fineman pointed to several moments in history involving technology that changed political campaigning:
· 2003 – Howard Dean’s campaign for President of the United States. Mr. Fineman called this the first website campaign. Mr. Dean, a competent governor, was largely unknown outside of his home state of Vermont, teamed up with political consultant Joe Trippi and Blue State Digital, an internet strategy and technology firm that enabled him to raise substantial amounts of money, get his name better known, and make himself into a national candidate.
· 2004 – Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. “The speech was electric,” Mr. Fineman said. “After hearing it everybody was saying that this guy would someday be President.” While that speech was, as Mr. Fineman said, “pre-YouTube,” it still was possible to share video via the ‘net and the Obama speech “went viral.”
· 2008 – The Obama campaign itself was, Mr. Fineman said, a Facebook campaign. One student at Bowodin College started an Obama page on Facebook and, in a relatively short time, had over 80,000 “friends.” Certainly there were issues that were discussed during the 2008 campaign, Mr. Fineman said, but Obama fueled the message of change via Facebook. “This was a guy you wanted to be friends with,” he said. Additionally, “people invented applications to run the campaign,” Mr. Fineman said, pointing out the creation of an iPhone application that used Global Positioning System technology to help find individuals who had or had not voted via absentee ballots.
· 2010 – Twitter and the Tea Party. Calling “
hash tag politics” an oversimplification, Mr. Fineman notes that the Tea Party movement, while having no iconography, can be summed up in fewer than 140 characters, “Less government. Lower Taxes. Less Regulation. Beat Obama.”
On the media side of the equation, he notes that Newsweek magazine was involved in the defining moment when technology overtook old media. He said the magazine’s investigative reporting team was about to break the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky story when the fledgling web site Drudge Report was going to post a news item saying that the Newsweek story about the affair was to be reported. In light of this, Newsweek decided to post the full story on its web site rather than wait for the printed edition of the magazine. “So the biggest scoop we had had in recent years first appeared on the world wide web,” he said. “To me, that was the beginning of a big change in journalism.”
He also pointed to the moment in 2006 when George Allen, who was running for Senator in Virginia, uttered a racial slur directly into the lens of a camera being operated by a volunteer for his opponent. “This ‘macaca moment’ went viral and destroyed his campaign,” Mr. Fineman said.
The evolution of mobile computing devices (“I used one of the first portable computers,” he said “A 40-pound luggable with a built in printer.”) hastened the end of on writers at the magazine’s New York offices (“With mobile computing we could write to space ourselves,” he said.)
The downsides to technology’s impact, he said, included the prospect of increased “silo” effect. That is, individuals will continue to flock to sources of information that agree with their point of view. “I am reminded of a quote from the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan,” Mr. Fineman said, “in that while we are all entitled to our own opinions, we are not entitled to our own facts.”
The final two lectures in this series will take place at Annenberg on October 18 and November 15. Watch the Annenberg web site for details.