What ifs for the weekend
I was having a conversation with a friend a couple days ago, and we started talking about the evolution of the media--both how it's already changed and how it will change in the months and years to come. Since then I've been thinking about...well a lot of related issues. But here are a few hypotheticals: If, in 2000, around the time of the Florida recount, there had been a progressive media infrastructure similar to what exists today, buttressed by the technological innovations that have come hence (blogs, YouTube, etc.), would it have made a difference? Also, has the emergence of this new way of doing things been entirely a function of the political unrest that has fallen out of that moment? If Gore had been elected, or the Bush years been unobjectionable, what would blogs and YouTube look like today? And if a period of stability is on our horizon, what will those sorts of platforms look like in the future? Discuss!
Comments
I don't see this "progressive media infrastructure" you speak of. I do think that liberals have gotten better at talking to each other, but mainstream culture is still owned by companies that sell weapons to the Pentagon. Until that changes, you'll hear a lot about haircuts.
Had Gore been named president in 2000 there's a good chance we would not have been attacked on 9/11/01, and an equally good chance that Gore would have been impeached. Maybe not convicted, but anybody can fake enough evidence to force a trial.
I disagree with MikeJ. First, the media have been forced to engage blogs with incresing regularity.
Had blogs and sites like MediaMatters been around not for recount 2000 but for campaign 2000, there might have been a sufficiently large push back against the crappy media coverage that Gore received. Segments on news shows that check in on the internet and blogs would have aided that push back.
On the other hand, I think what made so many people so passionate about watching the media and democratic politics in general is what took place in 2000. It pushed a lot of liberal leaning people into the solidly democratic camp and away from either Nader or centrist wavering.
People in 2004 said that that election was the most important of their lifetimes. I disagree. We lost, just barely, in 2000 what was clearly the most important election of my lifetime. If things had gone the other way, it might be the conservative media undergoing a dramatic transformation.
My sense of it is that the 2000 election may well have hinged upon which side--for lack of a better word--was loudest and best organized. If that's true, then I think it's quite possible that the media infrastructure that exists now on the left might have been able to tip things. Maybe that's too much of a contrived situation to be able to really know whether a better organized progressive media sphere is really making a big impact. But I suppose one of the best reasons for having such a structure in the first place is to prevent exactly those sorts of contrived things from happening in the first place.
Does anyone suppose that the blogosphere would have convinced Rehnquist, Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy or O'Connor to change their mind on Bush v. Gore?
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