September 2008 Archives

Watching CNN's debate coverage Friday night the eye couldn't help but turn to the "Audience Reaction Meter" that rose, fell, and flat-lined like a disconcerting heart monitor in an intensive care unit at every turn of rhetoric from the two candidates. Three lines - a blue one for Democrats, red for Republicans, and greenish white for independents bumped along on their various trajectories, instantaneously measuring voters' reactions to the candidates' performances as they unfolded in real time.

Confused viewers posted on Yahoo Answers and personal blogs, speculating about the science behind the reaction meter - was it really measuring audience heart response? A survey taken ahead of time? A remote clicker?

Spinspotter.com and NewsTrust.net attempt a similar mission of assisting web information gatherers in making judgments on a news source's reliability and objectivity. With the increasing amount of information available from sources outside legacy media, such devices provide an important tool to sift through the fat of the internet. They also give readers an opportunity to make their own assessments of media bias. The user-generated nature of these sites creates some pitfalls and inconsistencies but, far from letting readers off the hook by providing judgment for them, sites like these engage the readers' critical judgment, making them more shrewd information consumers.

Playing the ref is nothing new in politics. The Republicans have been hurling the "liberal media bias" accusation for decades but in this election cycle the jabs are particularly sharp and the fodder particularly rich.

The role of the press in lionizing Obama at the expense of Hillary Clinton during the primaries was hotly debated. Now critics have a new target in Sarah Palin. Questions over the media's unfair treatment of Palin began almost immediately as organizations scurried to dig up all and any information on a relative political cipher. The teen pregnancy frenzy entrenched that debate even further, driving the level of scrutiny of the media coverage to an all time high.

Michael Tomasky condemns the lawlessness of citizen journalism in his Guardian blog, Comment is Free,  claiming, "There can't just be anarchy." Well ... actually there can, and more importantly there is. So despite Tomasky explicitly decrying the pithy rejoinder, it just has to be said: deal with it.

And deal with it we shall. With no one to enforce rules on "witnesses" that are simply bearing witness to events with technologies like cameras, keyboards, and the internet, the shift in rules will have to occur in the audience that consumes the information, and in the players that are being witnessed, or "citizen reported" on. Thus in the example given of Obama's "closed-door" fundraising speech, Obama and his aides learned a very valuable new rule: everything he says and does that is witnessed can be reported and scrutinized.