Politics.tv gives us its Top 10 political videos for the week.
Archive for March, 2007
ParkRidge47, aka Phillip de Vellis, the guy who made that Hillary attack ad, is interviewed on video by YouTube’s editor of nesws and politics, Steve Grove. Good idea for making news on YouTube (and an interesting format: the asynchronous webcam interview).
de Vellis gives the geeky details: which machine and software he used to make it (he’s a Mac guy; I’ll be lots of Obama fans are). He says he picked the 1984 commercial to mash because he’s an Apple fan. It sounds as if he wanted to promote Apple more than Obama. I’d have thought his first point would have been ideological but, no, it’s geekological.
He argues that he didn’t think it would go viral: “I’m really stunned by the attention it got. I thought it was pretty cool when I did it and that it would get passed around on some progressive blogs. But I had no idea it would be shown on TV.” I think that’s a bit disingenuous; everybody who makes a YouTube video thinks it might just go viral.
Asked what he thinks the impact of the video is, he feints. “I’ll leave that to other people to decide.” He explains his anonymity as a matter of employment and defends the American tradition of anonymous speech, savoring the moment when he points out that 1984 was written by George Orwell, which was a pen name. But he says he understands why, when something gets this big, people want to know who’s behind it. “In this case, the system worked.”
What’s most telling, in the end, is the banality of it: He’s not, as it turns out, a slick operative with a master plan. He’s a geeky guy with the skills (and talent) to say what the heck and make something that amuses him. Oh, it might change the election and the world? That’s cool.
: MORE: Micah Sifry at TechPresident is impressed.
It’s as if he’s on a publicity tour. He also speaks with PoliticsTV:
He says there that he made the ad because he was frustrated the politicians were using the internet like TV, to broadcast, when they should be interacting with voters. “A pretend conversation isn’t enough.” Amen to that. I’m not completely sure how an anonymous attack furthers the conversation, but I agree with this argument nonetheless.
de Vellis argues that supporters should be making videos more than campaigns. So much for controlling the message.
He says that anybody could do what he did in their living room and he made it in just a couple of hours. He seeded it to just a few progressive blogs after he made it and it exploded to hundreds of thousands of views and then a San Francisco Chronicle reporter wrote a “too flattering” story and then it took off and caused more online links and, in turn, more media.
He declares that politics has changed. It is no longer in the hands of the powerful but is in the hands of ordinary citizens. Well, it’s getting there.
Forget foreign policy debates. Forget money-raising stories. Forget universal health care.
You know that today everybody’s going to be talking about South Park’s Hillary Clinton episode. Extended clip at Comedy Central. A little tease here:
YouTube’s Steve Grove gives a dramatic reading of Barack Obama’s poetry. Neither should quit their day jobs.
Over at Buzzmachine, David Johnson leaves a provocative comment on the impact of YouTube on local TV stations if and when political advertising migrates online:
there’s a big elephant in the room on viral video for politics. youtube could be for local broadcast what craigslist is for newspapers. most local broadcast stations desperately need political advertising to stay in the black. if the advertising pie doesn’t expand and dollars are shifted out of mainstream broadcast to online — as we’re seeing elsewhere already among major advertisers — this could have a serious impact on bottom lines at struggling affiliates.
Local affiliates are already facing a bleaker future than they’ll breath out loud because when the internet grows to become the dominant means of distribution, their value as distributors only shrinks. I hadn’t thought of political advertising as their Craigs List but I think he has a point. All political advertising won’t migrate online yet because the audience on broadcast is bigger and campaigns are inherently conservative. But there will be a point of no return.
In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Senator Barack Obama reiterated his support for troop withdrawl and characterized Senator John McCain’s position on Iraq as a ”continuation of the Bush policies over the past six years.”
McCain’s pointed response:
More from the Obama interview:
The Edwards campaign has produced a 12-minute video to be played at house parties that the candidate can’t attend in person.
Tip for house party hosts: make sure the bar is well stocked.
Here’s what John McCain thinks about setting timetables for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq: “If you think that things are bad now, if we withdraw, you ain’t seen nothing yet. There will be chaos. There will be genocide. And we will now see Iraq as a center of terrorism.”
TechPresident’s Joshua Levy does an excellent job showing that Barack Obama’s huge numbers on YouTube are likely gamed and inflated. And this makes me wonder whether his MySpace numbers are similarly manufactured. Add this to the anonymous anti-Hillary video made by a political operative and you get a disturbing, or at least unflattering, picture of some of Obama’s supporters. Some are trying to hack his campaign for him.
No one is saying that Obama’s staff is doing this. But it could hurt him nonetheless. That anti-Hillary commercial, coming from a hidden source, smelled of a dirty trick. Somebody’s engineering lies about at least his YouTube viewership. People will wonder how much of his buzz is elusive, the effort to goose it even desperate. See Peter Hauck’s post below asking whether the honeymoon is waning. Remember, too, the unwelcome attitude many in Iowa had to the invasion by hordes of Deaniacs with accents from elsewhere. It may be easy to hack a campaign, but I doubt whether it will be effective.
Last week in California, I was talking with some people who know about these things and they thought the Obama’s numbers were bogus but didn’t yet know how to prove it. TechPresident’s Levy shows how the number of visitors and views just don’t match up. The clearest evidence of fishiness is all this is TechPresident’s own YouTube chart, which they acknowledge looks darned suspicious:
But there’s a problem with all these numbers even if they aren’t bald-faced lies. We are so accustomed to the horse-race story in politics, the narrative media loves to push, that we are in a constant hunt for new numbers and new charts that tell that tale. Beware internet numbers, though. This is not a mass medium. It is a mass of niches. And even the biggest numbers are necessarily small. It’s the sum of all those small numbers that is huge. In other words, this is not a medium of winners and losers but of coalitions. Last week, amidst the Hillary 1984 commercial kefuffle, a half-dozen reporters called me working on the exact same story (which indicates a problem with reporting, but that’s a subject for another blog), and one of them asked whether the number of negative Hillary videos on YouTube indicated a loss of momentum for her (Mo is their favorite angle in the horse-race story). I laughed, which was more polite than scoffing with scorn. One person can make 10 anti-anybody videos. A hundred can make a thousand. And all that indicates is the thinking of 100 people, not the mood and mo of the nation. The numbers of views is similarly misleading, if you let them be: I watched the Hillary commercial because it was entertaining and being talked about, not because I agreed with it. No, the press hates this, but there’s only one number that matters — the election-day tally, of course — and that’s the one scoop they can’t have; it’s ours. So whether they’re gamed or not, view all these internet tallies with suspicion. They are for entertainment only, no wagering or governing with them allowed.
JD Lasica asks what sacrifices the candidates will ask of us:
Honeymoon over for Obama?
It’s as predictable as robins in spring: A candidate goes from flavor-of-the-month to political piñata. Is the Barack backlash beginning?
- The Politico cites “Rookie Mistakes.”
- AP asks “Is Obama all style and little substance?”
- According to some reports, Obama’s appearance at last weekend’s health care forum in Las Vegas wasn’t up to the Clinton and Edwards performances. Watch an extended video of his remarks. View all Obama campaign videos here.
YouTube Nation
In his syndicated column, National Review’s Rich Lowry lauds YouTube’s “robustly unregulated - and thus invaluable - political marketplace.” He says “the public can be trusted to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is its proper role in an open society . . . The hand-wringers look at the ‘1984’ ad and see an awful trend, potentially dragging down our politics. Instead, they should see freedom.”
Money, Money, Money
Breitbart.com has 8 “secret” video clips of the March 24 Los Angeles fundraiser for Hillary Clinton hosted by Beverly Hills billionaire Ron Burkle. (Clinton raised $2.7 million that night to bring her haul for the week to $10 million.) The videos are a little dark and the camera is a little jumpy but the audio quality is good. Worth a gander.
Katie Couric’s 60 Minutes interview with John and Elizabeth Edwards produced squawking in certain quarters. Here’s a Katie-centric remix from The Blue State that’s racking up a lot of YouTube views.
CBS News has posted the complete interview here.
Couric writes in her CBS News blog that she was surprised that some people viewed the interview “in a negative way.”
I was also surprised to read an article in the New York Times about how people viewed this story through their own personal prisms – some in a negative way. I really used some of those voices as a framework for my questions. I knew that everyone was reacting differently to this, and I wanted the Edwards to have a chance to elaborate and respond to issues people were raising. When the interview was over, the biggest complement came from Senator Edwards, who thanked me and said: “You asked all the questions that were out there.” I think they appreciated having an opportunity to respond.
Newt Gingrich, the uncandidate, says “it’s very clear that our current political system is utterly, totally incapable of serious conversation.”
He says that the Hillary 1984 attack is is “utterly totally destructive of the process of thought. There is not a single thing in that commercial that enables America to solve a problem.”
Oh, crap, I’m agreeing with Gingrich. He continues:
“Oh, it’s clever. Fills up space on television. People can talk about it. It’s the Entertainment Tonight version of governing a great country. And it’s very dangerous. Because we have no habits anymore of serious dialogue. We have no habits of serious citizenship. Everything is reduced to gossip, attack, whose consultant is cleverer, and it’s really very destructive.”
This from the man who impeached a president over gossip and shut down the government over a snub and faced no shortage of ethics charges. But nevermind, I’m agreeing with the man today.
Gingrich challenges the candidates to agree to have a 90-minute dialogue once a week, once nominated, “with a timekeeper and no moderator, no mickey mouse questions, no gimmicks. Two adults, much like Lincoln and Douglas…. which were seven three-hour debates.” This will surely make us sick of them. But, yes, it’s better than attack ads.
And he urges us to join this YouTube group. “YouTube,” his video says, “can be used for discussing ideas, not just negative attack ads.” Amen.
ABC squandered an opportunity to get a candidate to respond to video questions from the people. Good Morning America solicited those questions. I submitted one. But they didn’t show one on the air. They should have not only showed one of our questions to Hillary Clinton, they should have put all the videos online so she could answer any and all of them on YouTube.
In case you missed Katie Couric’s 60 Minutes interview with John and Elizabeth Edwards, here are some highlights.
Couric caught flak in some quarters for her questions and style. The morning after fallout:
- The Chicago Tribune
- Public Eye, the CBS News blog
- Romenesko
