The Blogging of the President

At his new site The Blogging of the President: 2004, Chris Lydon writes:

Once upon a time the reporters who covered the presidential candidates were dubbed “the boys on the bus,” and in my first campaign assignment with The New York Times in 1972 I was one of them. In the campaign of 2004 I feel more like a Martian in a baseball dugout. [...]

I'd like you to join me please in a new conversation around the presidential campaign. It feels like time to relearn a game in which all the rules have changed. We are looking everyday at a digital transformation of the constitutional ritual in which the American people choose their chieftain. So the invitation to all comers is to keep talking and posting till we get this story straight. Give me your comments, your essays, your emails, and together we will figure this out.

Lydon continues:

What drives me into this project, all I really understand, is that the common authorities on the subject, the better newspapers and broadcast voices, the enlightened chattering classes, have lost touch with the presidential campaign story.

Here's more of his foundational post.

Check out the artful categories in the right rail: "Transformation Blogs," "Communities," "The New AP," etc.

Comments

[Charles J. Kershner]

The most notable change over the last decade or so is the use of TV by all politicians to spread their word, from announcing a candidacy to a string of political ads. The medium for discourse has changed from print to broadcast and now to web, and the multiplicity of media has done little to help the public focus its attention on any particular issue or person with any surety that they are getting all the "information" they need to make sound decisions. What they are getting is a lot of "noise", which, I believe, is what politicians really want to disseminate. Noise is hard to define let alone interpret and the more noise that can be generated over the greatest number of medium leaves the receiver (in this case, the public) with no good alternative than to parse the noise and pick out it what they "think" they heard and saw (and in lesser instances, read). While not of presidential stature, where else could Californians -- and the entire known universe -- have learned that Arnold Schwarzenneger was running for governor other than by watching/listening to his announcement on Jay Leno's late night chat show? No embargoed news release sent to the AP, networks, and major metros, followed by a news conference. The president uses the same technique: speak to the public primarily through tv; send out admin hacks to make the round of the Sunday talk shows mistakenly identified as news and information programs; speaking primarily to heavily vetted, friendly audiences guaranteed to shout and clap on cue, etc. I still prefer to read about the president and the campaign, however tedious reading may be these days, in the newspaper. There I find all the bits n pieces that the sound bite or film clip can't or won't include. There is NO easy answer to this political conundrum. We can, of course, trust the public to exercise common sense in parsing the information or sound bites or whatever and making wise decisions at the ballot box. However, in the end, people get who they vote for -- good, bad or ugly. --Chuck Kershner, executive editor, Clinton (NY)Courier