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Much more than the buzz-word of the day...Insightful commentary and amazing links
By Tarek Atia
Instant politics
It's happening, whether you want it to or not. The way media and politics interacts is going through a landmark change. It's been on the way for a while, of course, and the stepping stones and stopping points can all be pointed to, but the coverage of such an important and globally influential event as the US presidential election has made this transformation the stuff of life.
I mean this literally of course. Who doesn't sit glued to the TV, to CNN if you're outside the United States, to a rapid-fire surf through every channel in the horizon if you're in the US, and randomly and mechanically between wide-ranging sources of content on the net no matter where you are.
And there, on the air and especially on the net, a different sort of media dynamic is playing a greater role than ever before in determining who is going to win this thing, or at least, how we feel about it.
The signs are everywhere. From CNN "deciding" (their word) that New Mexico needed a recount, to a site like beliefnet fronting its coverage of the election results with one of its reader's comments: "Bush and Gore should be falling all over themselves to concede," is the bold-faced headline. Only later, after we read the rest of the text – " Bush should concede if that one county in Florida turns out as screwy as it looks like. Gore should concede if Bush wins Florida after 10 days of waiting for overseas ballots." -- do we discover that this "lead story" was actually written by Beliefnet member dibble
CNN, we already know, is a king-maker. The network's popularity and global reach has often meant that it helps determine the events, rather than merely cover them.
When beliefnet and its purely-online ilk can boast as many daily users as CNN, they will have just as much power to influence the way we, the general public, understand the politics of everything in the world around us.
The major difference, however, between the CNN "model" and the beliefnet "model" of media-influence is the approach. CNN is top-down, and beliefnet is bottom up.
"Bottom-up", or "community-driven" sites allow the users to actually be the content producers, rather than just consumers of content, as in the traditionally successful media model. In fact, the media majors, like CNN and the Washington Post, have, ever since they took their traditional model to the web, been trying to find an online balance to this equation. What usually happens is that they headline with their traditional top-down approach to news, but always include reader forums, live chats and other new media, community-driven content in order to satisfy the new, more "democratic", web-soaked media consumer.
Beliefnet seems to have taken it to a different level. Its layout unselfconsciously mirrors that of traditional news organizations' presence on the web. That, in effect, gives it the legitimacy of a long-standing news-gathering operation. But then it turns that fact on its head by headlining its site with a mere reader comment, albeit accompanied by a typical news graphic, making it look like the comment and the graphic are the equivalent of the "CNN top news item of the day".
The goal is to get web-surfers involved in the creation of this story. Their opinions actually become the story.
Newsforchange is another site that takes this dynamic in another direction altogether. It presents the reader with a certain – or in some cases, multi-faceted – perspective on the news. It then immediately challenges the reader to take action. In this case, what's required is more than just a letter to the editor or a bulletin board paste. No, you are expected to actually take even more direct political action. By agreeing, the site takes you to a parallel site called actforchange, where you then sign on-line petitions and send letters to government officials. In the case of the US presidential election, the site asks you to sign a petition demanding fair elections in Florida.
The efficacy of all these new media roles is still being determined. What's certain, however, is that the whole media game is becoming ever more predominant in our lives. Even media criticism, such as this, lends the transformation more weight.
Notes to consider as you browse these sites:
--Do they reveal any biases regarding the leanings of the publishers/responsible organizations (big business/religious groups/etc)?
--What trends are revealed by the user participation? Are these conclusions reliable; i.e., do they reflect shifts in societal moods?
--How, like with much of what traditional media reports, can we guarantee that most of what we're reading in the "community-driven" sites is not made-up, or else generated by in-house staff, and thus in many ways still "top-down"?
Did you like this article? Send your comments to comments@cairolive.com
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