Online Elites

Over at HFA, Ryan and Megan are arguing that elites are starting to dominate the online world, which undercuts our argument that the Internet promotes democracy. I'll take each of their posts separately.

Ryan argues that there is an elite class within the blogosphere:

Certainly blogs and podcasts are more democratic and open than TV or radio, which cost an arm and a leg. But even in the blogosphere we have an elite class emerging. Matt Stoller gives a great history of the beginnings of the 2004 campaign blogging. Reading it, you see two names repeat: Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Dailykos.com. "kos" started draftclark.com and helped Armstrong redesign MyDD.com; Armstrong in turn was pushing Trippi to use Meetup.

As usual, Ryan makes some good points. Armstrong and Moulitsas have been very influential, and Daily Kos is now the undisputed leader of the liberal blogosphere. Indeed, the list of major blogs in 2006 resembles the list in 2003--with Daily Kos, Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Atrios' Eschaton, and Talking Points Memo still near the top of the list. But these sites gained popularity not because a corporation promoted them, but because people were drawn to what they were saying. Moulitsas and Armstrong had no power in politics before they began blogging. Matt Soller's history describes their sites as "what two political amateurs started as a hobby." Only after they had established themselves did they begin to help the Dean and Clark campaigns. I view this as the success of bloggers in a meritocracy, not the creation of a permanent elite.

Megan responds to an earlier post of mine regarding the Trent Lott affair:

The Trent Lott story of information flow from the blogosphere to mainstream media is clearly the exception, not the rule. TforA concludes by commenting, "The Lott affair showed that a few individuals--mostly outsiders with no budgets--could kick the national media into action and shake up the U.S. government." But the "outsiders" were already part of the blogosphere elite! And their power to "kick the national media into action" is overstated by TforA: Traditional news sources still dominate internet news while blogs function as the backwater, out of which occasionally comes a story wrongly ignored by the mainstream.

I think Megan is correct that mainstream news outlets continue to dominate Internet news. Part of the reason for this is that newspapers have budgets large enough to send reporters to cover events and conduct investigations. Bloggers meet a different need--to cover stories that are being ignored by the mainstream media (e.g. Trent Lott, the Killian memos, and the early Dean campaign itself), and to collect information from a broader base of sources than any single reporter can access. I don't think that mainstream media will be overtaken by blogs anytime soon. But blogs will continue to be an influential supplement to mainstream media, correcting its errors and picking up the stories it misses. Nothing like this existed before the online era. At best, people could try to write letters to the editor, organize public protests, or hand out pamphlets if they felt that the news that matters to them was being ignored. Now they can gain a worldwide audience from their living rooms.

What is Change?

At HFA, Megan asks an important question--what exactly does it mean to say that Dean "changed" the nature of campaigning?

Megan correctly states that the question is not what happened to Dean, but what will happen in future races. She argues that Dean's success in part the result of his technological edge over other candidates, but wonders if the dynamics of campaigning will be any different once all candidates and all voters have equal access to the Internet.

I have two responses. First, I think "change" includes a major shift in technology, even if the same types of candidates continue to win. Thus, if the success of the Dean campaign induces all future presidential candidates to make heavy use of the Internet, it's fair to say that he "changed" the nature of campaigning even if the results don't change.

Second, I believe that the Dean campaign's innovations will change the results of elections in the coming years. The biggest problem with traditional media is barriers to entry. The average person cannot have any influence on television. At best, they can get a letter to the editor published in a newspaper or call in to a radio show. The odds of gaining any control over the media are virtually nil. As this illustration shows, most media outlets were controlled by ten large companies in late 2001, and my guess is that there has been even more consolidation since then.

In contrast, starting a blog costs nothing. (We wouldn't be blogging here today if there were any barriers to entry.) Getting your blog noticed is trickier, but the blogosphere resembles a meritocracy--if your posts are consistently high-quality, someone will begin to link to them. Although some major blogs today owe their existence to existing media outlets (e.g. National Review publishes The Corner, The American Prospect publishes Tapped, Andrew Sullivan was a former editor of The New Republic), many were started by nobodies. If starting a blog is too difficult, posting on an existing blog is another option. Any diary posted on Daily Kos has a chance of making it to the "Recommended Diaries" list, where it will be seen by literally thousands of people. The Internet is the only medium today that allows someone with no resources except time and good ideas to transmit their statements around the world.

What does this mean for campaigning? Once financial resources are less of a barrier to participation in politics, people who were previously excluded from the political process will become involved. People who posted on Dean's blog knew that thousands of people around the country, including higher-ups in the Dean campaign and perhaps Dean himself, would read and respond to what they had to say. When Internet access is nearly universal, there will be more room in our system for candidates who are not beholden to the wealthy. As Joe Trippi points out in The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a candidate who can get $100 each from two million Americans will be able to compete with candidates funded largely by the wealthy. The Dean campaign demonstrated that a more egalitarian system of campaigning is possible.

On Egocasting

Megan and Ryan at HFA discuss "EgoCasting," for which Megan provides the following definition:

An important psychological consideration in assessing the merits of the Internet as a campaign tool is the concept of “egocasting.” Christine Rosen writes, egocasting is “a world where we exercise an unparalleled degree of control over what we watch and what we hear.” She continues, “We can consciously avoid ideas, sounds, and images that we don’t agree with or don’t enjoy.

They go on to argue that Internet users seek out only the information they want to hear. In contrast, they argue, television viewers can't control what they see to the same degree. If an anti-Bush or anti-Kerry commercial is aired during the evening news, you'll see it whether you want to or not, whereas on the Internet you can just avoid clicking on it.

They have a point, but they exaggerate the difference between the Internet and traditional media. A glance at the blogosphere seems to confirm their argument. Liberal bloggers link almost exclusively to liberal sources, and conservative bloggers link almost exclusively to conservative sources. Also, because most commenters on a blog agree with the blog's ideology, anyone who posts a dissenting viewpoint will be quickly shouted down. That said, however, Internet users are not quite as insulated from dissent as Ryan and Megan think. Unlike television, the Internet allows opportunities for genuine interaction. When you see a statement on television, you can't challenge it and have the television respond to you. When you see a statement on the Internet, you can challenge it and argue back and forth as long as both parties to the debate are willing. Whenever anyone makes an error in logic or fact on a blog, a dozen commenters will immediately point it out. On television and in newspapers, any corrections are generally buried at the end of a program or in small print on a newspaper's back page.

Furthermore, television, newspapers, and radio increasingly allow the same EgoCasting opportunities as the Internet, without the countervailing benefit of interactivity. First, the rise of TiVo may signal the beginning of the end of televised advertising, because viewers will be able to skip past commercials. Second, television stations and newspapers are increasingly appealing to niche markets. Want a conservative viewpoint? Tune in to Bill O'Reilly or read The Washington Times. Want a liberal viewpoint? Watch Keith Olbermann or read The Nation. Many mainstream media outlets claim to appeal to the center (e.g. CNN, The New York Times), but they are under fire from both conservatives and liberals who want to hear something that supports their views. I don't think that Fox News's rise happened despite their ideological leanings, but rather because of them.

In short, Egocasting is a phenomenon that affects all forms of media--but only the Internet allows the kind of real-time, uncontrolled communication that could interfere with a carefully packaged message.

Dean Lost - Does This Mean Nothing Changed?

In this post I'm going to respond to Ryan's post Beginning at the End over at HFA. First, Ryan argues that the Dean campaign's collapse in January 2004 shows that not much had changed:

First, it may be a bit circular to make this point, but Dean's campaign couldn't have been all that much of a revolution if he didn't win. He didn't even make it out of the Democratic primaries. He didn't even get the consolation prize of the vice-presidential nod. A lasting revolution usually has something you can point to, some kind of victory... but his campaign does not seem to have that.

Dean did get a consolation prize--chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. He won this position despite the opposition of many prominent Democrats. In contrast, liberal bloggers strongly supported Dean and attacked his opponents--for example, emphasizing Martin Frost's support for many of Bush's policies. Furthermore, through grassroots fundraising, Dean has raised more money than any other DNC Chairman in a similar period. This looks like strong evidence that Dean's campaign was more than a blip.

Ryan continues:

Second, traditional media -- TV and newspapers -- played a large role in Dean's undoing. Look at Joe Trippi's book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and you'll see the role that negative TV ads (those relics of an ancient world) played in destroying Dean in Iowa.

It's true that Dean's last-minute collapse in Iowa was fueled by negative television advertising. As long as Americans watch television and read newspapers, the traditional media will remain important in campaigns. But I think it's worth asking: How did Dean become a contender in Iowa at all? The explanation is that his ability to raise money and support online made him the national front-runner. Dean was getting pounded from all sides in January 2004 and his inexperienced staff did not respond effectively. (It also didn't help that Dean had been videotaped bashing the very caucus he was attempting to win.) Future campaigns, however, will be able to combine Dean's innovative Internet strategy with expertise in traditional media. Any campaign that focuses entirely on traditional media will likely be at a disadvantage.

Ryan's third point:

Sure some people might say that yearrgh actually represents how powerful the internet can be. There's certainly some truth to that, but winning the White House is such an unbelieveably difficult challenge that it takes a coordinated message and a clear plan. TV changed campaigns because it had immense reach, but the high barriers for entry made it controllable. The yearggh shows that the internet may be too uncontrollable for a major, national campaign.

Ryan raises a good point here. The chaotic online world is not the ideal medium for message discipline. But I think that future candidates will not have much of a choice except to embrace the Internet. Witness the number of major Democratic politicans who have been posting on Daily Kos over the past year. Consider the fact that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid will be a keynote speaker at the YearlyKos convention in June 2006. These politicians have apparently decided that online outreach is important enough to outweigh the risk of being associated with the uncontrollable blogosphere.

If all we are arguing is that traditional media is still important, then Ryan is right. But I think the real argument is not whether people continue to be influenced by television and newspapers, but rather whether the Internet is an indispensable element of future national campaigns. I believe that it is--with one caveat. The Republicans, as both the party in power and the party that has traditionally relied less on the "grassroots," have greater leeway to skimp on their Internet efforts. They are not rushing to embrace the blogs as quickly as the Democrats are. Still, Dean demonstrated what a low-budget campaign can become by using the Internet, and I think we will see plenty of candidates from both parties trying to copy this formula--and succeeding.

Dean Leads, His Rivals Follow - 2004

This will be the last of my "background" posts before I get into the thick of the debate over whether Dean's campaign really changed everything. Over at Hype for America, they're starting to make the case against us. We'll hit 'em back soon enough.

Below, Johnny described Dean's unprecedented success with online fundraising, social networking via MeetUp, and connecting with people through blogs. Naturally, when Dean's efforts began to pay off, other candidates decided to jump on the bandwagon. In addition to Dean, at least six other candidates created blogs--Bush, Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark, Bob Graham, and Joe Lieberman. (Some argue that Bush's blog was not really a "blog" in spirit, because it was the only one that did not allow readers to post comments.) Although donation patterns varied significantly by candidate, the trend was a significant increase in online donations.

Aside from Dean, Wesley Clark made the most effective use of the Internet among Democratic primary candidates. The "Draft Clark" movement, largely organized online, provided a solid base of Internet-savvy supporters for Clark's campaign. Clark's Meetup support was second only to Dean's. Clark's campaign also pioneered the use of E-Blocks, which allowed supporters around the country to contact potential voters.

Independent blogs played a role in fundraising and organization during the 2004 season. By 2004, Daily Kos had transformed itself from a mere blog to a full-fledged community of thousands of users. Members of Daily Kos contributed $500,000 to fifteen Democratic candidates whom Markos Moulitsas Zúniga had identified as neglected by traditional sources of funding. Although all of these candidates lost, Moulitsas defends the effort by pointing out that they were chosen because they were underdogs and unlikely to win, and that a few of them came very close to achieving major upsets.

During the primaries, most liberal bloggers supported Dean or Clark. After Kerry won the primary, most of these bloggers transferred their support to Kerry, although some were less than enthusiastic about him. Some members of Daily Kos were irritated with the Kerry campaign for removing the DailyKos.com link from the official Kerry blog in response to some insensitive comments posted by Moulitsas. But Kerry could not shun the site forever; by early 2006, he was posting on Daily Kos, joining Democratic heavyweights such as Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Barack Obama, and Jon Corzine by appealing directly to the "netroots." In 2005, Boxer credited the Daily Kos community with helping her question Condoleezza Rice during her Secretary of State confirmation hearings, and with helping to delay the appointment of John Bolton as UN Ambassador.

But I'm getting ahead of myself--back to 2004. Conservative bloggers were almost completely united in their support of Bush, given his lack of a primary opponent. Some blogs (such as Blogs for Bush, created in November 2003 and still updated regularly today) were originally created with the specific goal of helping Bush win reelection. During the general election, a few prominent conservative bloggers--notably Andrew Sullivan and Daniel Drezner--reluctantly defected to Kerry, but they were a tiny minority.

The biggest victory for conservative bloggers during the 2004 election season resulted from the Killian documents controversy. Dan Rather presented a 60 Minutes report regarding documents allegedly from the 1970's that criticized Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. Only a few hours after the story aired, a member of Free Republic claimed that the documents must be forgeries because the font could not have been produced by a 1970's typewriter. The blog Power Line and others pushed the story aggressively and collected information from readers. CBS was soon forced to admit that it could not prove the memos' authenticity. When Dan Rather retired shortly after the controversy, conservative bloggers took credit. They now had a "scalp" of their own to match Trent Lott. Some liberal bloggers believe that this was a set-up, because the Free Republic member who first questioned the memos was a Republican insider with no apparent expertise in typography who posted shortly after the 60 Minutes story aired. Even if they are correct, however, the incident did demonstrate the ability of bloggers to collect and share technical information rapidly.

The above is not intended to be an exhaustive review of online activity during the 2004 election. Almost no event related to the 2004 campaign escaped scrutiny from bloggers, and the online fundraising and organizing efforts were vast. Cataloguing everything that happened online in 2004 would be nearly impossible. The point I am making is that 2004 represented something largely new in the world of politics. Never before had so much information been exchanged online. Never before had it been so easy for supporters of a candidate to find each other in cyberspace and in the real world. As we will argue in subsequent posts, 2004 marks the beginning of a fundamental change in the nature of campaigning.

The Explosion of Political Blogging - 2000-2002

Blogging as we know it today was born between the end of the 2000 and 2002 elections.

In November 2000, a journalist named Joshua Micah Marshall created a blog Talking Points Memo to discuss the disputed 2000 election. Andrew Sullivan, a former editor of the New Republic, reportedly began blogging in late 2000; the first posts in his archive date from January 2001. "Atrios" (a then-anonymous professor named Duncan Black) created Eschaton in April 2001, pondering with his second post "I wonder how long it will be until literally dozens of people are reading this on an almost monthly basis." Jerome Armstrong created MyDD in June 2001 to discuss a special congressional election, and expanded it in 2002 to cover a wider range of political topics. Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, created Instapundit in August 2001. An army veteran named Markos Moulitsas Zúniga started Daily Kos in May 2002 with the defiant statement "I am progressive. I am liberal. I make no apologies."

When the Dean campaign created Blog For America in March 2003, as Johnny discusses below, it was the first blog of any presidential campaign. The political blog had its precursors in sites like The Drudge Report and Free Republic, but political blogging as we know it was created after 2000.

Blogs had a major impact on national politics for the first time in December 2002, after Trent Lott commented that if the country had voted for segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond in 1948, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years." Lott made his comments on December 5 with minimal reaction in the mainstream press (with a December 7 Washington Post story as a notable exception). By December 7, Josh Marshall was reporting that the mainstream media seemed to have little interest in the story. During the following week, Marshall, Atrios, and others uncovered Lott's other pro-segregation statements throughout his career. Within a few days of the bloggers' coverage, the mainstream media picked up the story, and Trent Lott was forced to resign by December 20. Although this incident is repeatedly cited as the first "scalp" claimed by bloggers, they did not take Lott down alone. Their real contribution was to dig up incriminating evidence and keep the story alive long enough for the mainstream media to gain interest.

The Lott affair showed that a few individuals--mostly outsiders with no budgets--could kick the national media into action and shake up the U.S. government. Perhaps it was no surprise that a bunch of outsiders with a small budget would become the first presidential campaign to use blogging to force the media and government to pay attention.

Before the Dean Campaign - 1996-2000

Johnny has done a good job summarizing the innovations of the Dean campaign. In this post, I'm going to discuss the online strategies of some of its predecessors.

The 1996 presidential campaign was the first with significant use of the internet. Both major parties--along with the Libertarian, Green, and Reform Parties--created websites for themselves and their candidates. These sites look primitive by today's standards, but they contain a sizeable amount of information. There are also some interactive features (e.g. a chat room on the Republican Party site) but nothing comparable to what we take for granted today. Books proclaiming the significance of the Internet for the '96 campaign were published. ("The Net . . . will be the voice and the lightening rod of the '96 Campaign!") But overall, the Internet was a sideshow, and the real 1996 campaign was conducted through traditional media.

By 1998, the Internet had become more sophisticated, but it was still not a necessity for a congressional campaign. One study reviewed 1,397 congressional and gubenatorial races in 1998, and found that the majority of candidates had neither a website nor an email address. There was no significant difference in the overall pattern of internet usage by the two major parties. Although not all national politicians used it for their campaigns, the Internet affected the 1998 race in another way--through Matt Drudge's January 1998 release of information about Monica Lewinsky that would lead to President Clinton's impeachment after the election. Groups used the Internet to distribute petitions for and against impeachment. For example, Arianna Huffington (who opposed Clinton at the time) collected 13,303 names on a petition calling on Clinton to resign. MoveOn.org led the drive against impeachment, collecting 250,000 signatures against impeachment.

The websites from the 2000 campaign were much more sophisticated than those from four years earlier. The Bush, Gore, McCain, Bradley, and Nader sites not only look like today's modern campaign sites, but also have features such as state-by-state resources and frequent press releases that resemble primitive blogs. Of the candidates, McCain's internet efforts received the most attention. McCain held the world's first "cyberfundraiser", and collected $2.6 million over the Internet in the eight days after his victory in the New Hampshire primary. McCain's statements in 2000 foreshadow what Dean's supporters would be saying four years later:

"Even more impressive than the money is the way we can communicate with people," McCain said on the bus. "We can communicate with them eight to 10 times a day. You know how much it cost to communicate with someone eight times a day before the Internet? It's going to change politics."

...

As McCain told me on the bus, it's cleaner money, because the donor isn't shaking your hand and reminding you about a bill he wants you to vote against. "It's smaller donors," McCain said. "And clearly, it's less personal." It's new money: Thirty-nine percent of those who answer the questionnaire say they've never given to a political campaign before.

In the end, the online efforts in 2000 did not represent a revolution in campaigning. Despite McCain's success with online fundraising, about 95 percent of contributions were made offline, and 40 percent of websites could not even accept campaign contributions. Information was transmitted to voters more quickly, but this was largely one-way, with few attempts being made to interact with voters other than an unsuccessful cyberdebate. Despite the mixed success, commentators saw the extraordinary potential of the internet, especially online contributions, for the next election cycle.

In my next post, I'll discuss the 2002 elections, which coincided with the explosion of blogging that would influence the Dean campaign.

Welcome to Type for America

Welcome to our blog, Type for America. As part of the Internet, Law & Politics seminar at Harvard Law School, we have created this blog to argue that the Dean campaign's online strategies and tactics changed campaigning forever. The name of the blog comes from the name of Dean's campaign website (Dean for America) and blog (Blog for America). "Type" refers to what Internet users do--namely, a lot of typing.

We are carrying on a friendly rivalry with Hype for America, which argues that the predictions about the long-term impact of Dean's use of technology is a lot of hype. We want to hear your feedback too, so please feel free to comment on each post. The posts are arranged in reverse chronological order, so it will make the most sense if you start from the bottom and move up.

Click here to go to the main page of our blog.