"Playback" : Obama's Health Care Speech

Live blogs, excited tweets and re-mixed broadcast clips flooded the internet last Wednesday as journalists scrammbled to cover Obama's health care speech. Websites tried to be new and sassy in synthesizing the story through a combination of innovative multi-media techniques.

 Politico and The HuffPost provide two good examples. 

HuffPost

Bloggers/Journalists of the Huffington made comments about Obama's speech on a bloggers reaction page as Obama gave the speech.  All the bloggers/journalists that participated in the live blog have been writing about the health care debate since this past summer, when Obama initiated a reform plan. As can be expected of the Huffington, a liberal leaning website, the bloggers gave Obama very positive reviews.

 Examples include:

Paul Begala: "Obama's speech rallied dispirited Democrats, reassured disenchanted independents and intimidated Republicans. He called out lies, and pledged to call out the right-wing thugs if they continue lying.

Peter Dreier: "Having a president who inspires people to act collectively on their own behalf can make a difference. It gives people hope and courage to defy obstacles."

Ray Hanania: "The President's speech was so powerful it probably sent many of the nation's health insurance industry robber barons into economic cardiac arrest."

However, some of the Huffington bloggers seemed upset about the President's lack of commitment to a public option.

Cenk Uygur: "Why bah humbug Obama's health care speech? Because it went almost exactly as predicted. Great rhetorical flourishes, but did anyone hear him say that he was definitely going to fight for the public option? No."

But most were upset about the Republican "You Lie" and Sarah Palin. Why liberal bloggers chose to pass the attention to Republicans, the same Republicans who are very out of power, beats the who-ya out of me. I guess it was more entertaining to write about...

John R. Bohrer: "Republicans are so high on themselves that one thought nothing of screaming, "Lie!" at the President of the United States as he was, ironically, in the middle of dispelling their lies."

Bob Burnett: "On September 9, Republican members of the House and Senate acted like petulant fraternity boys forced to attend Sunday mass."

Shannyn Moore: "Palin's Facebook page response to the president's speech on health care reform, I had to walk away and count to ten -- in Russian. Here is her statement with my response."

As you can see, the entries were very pithy and straight to the point. They mimicked a sort of twitter style without the exact 140 character limitation. The bloggers also had the option to make their comments longer by linking to their own blog pages, although the only thing that shows up on the Huffington reaction page is the short blurb. 

The most interesting aspect to the live blog would be the twitter feed Huffington attached to the bottom. It's interesting to see the citizen perspective on the speech alongside the pundit comments. What's more interesting is which tweets Huffington decided to add to its page. It shows what the Huffington perceives as important public comments or at least what it thinks public comments should be.

Politico

Politico covered the speech through a mixture of strategies.  Throughout the day it posted a lot of articles written about the upcoming address as sort of a pre-game or lead-up to the main event. It also summarized the health care plan and added some analysis, like a traditional news outlet would, immediately following the speech. One of the articles that compared Obama's speech to Clinton's 1993 speech on health care reform was particularly interesting. The Politico journalist, Eamon Javers, went so far as to count the number of times both Presidents used the same jargon in their speeches. However, the more telling analysis Javers made related to the style and composition of the Obama speech versus the Clinton speech.

Politico also effectively used it multimedia to cover the speech. It condensed Obama's hour long address into a series of five minute segments. Each segment was subtitled, which made it very easy for the user who did not want to watch the whole speech get the main gist of it. It included a 6 minute highlights reel.

"Highlights of Obama's Address":