Close the books on Florida, on to Super Tuesday. Among the elbowing political media, however, British new media commentator Andrew Keen already sees a clear 2008 loser -- the Internet.
In a crisp
piece in the
Independent Monday, Keen argues that the Internet has taken a step back this year from 2004 and 2006. Ron Paul is an online fundraising phenomenon, but a distinctly lesser force than was Howard Dean in 2004. There have been no "macaca moments," equivalent to the racial insult, captured on YouTube, that sank the 2006 Senate campaign of Virginia's George Allen (once a favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, remember).
Conceding that the YouTube/CNN debates have advanced the art, Keen writes that the biggest campaign moment to date -- Hillary Clinton choking up in a New Hampshire coffee shop -- was shot by the omnipresent network cameras.
I would be a little more generous: Online video boosted the ease of unmediated viewing and re-viewing of the pivotal few minutes in which Clinton humanized herself -- and provides a way of watching the livelier debate exchanges without slogging through the whole thing.
Though Keen was talking about editorial, the same applies to advertising. Analyst Gordon Borrell has
estimated (free registration required) that the Internet will get only 0.5 percent of this year's political ad dollars, a feeble share compared to its 9 percent of overall ad spending. The campaigns seem as stuck as ever on the same old, same old of repeating identical 30-second spots ad nauseam in battleground states like Florida.
That is despite some evidence that newspaper advertising stands out from the crowd, as noted in a
Wall Street Journal article by Kevin Helliker last summer. Plus many news Web sites now offer political blogs that would seem a great and inexpensive way to target campaign ad messages to the most motivated voters.
Maybe the Internet, as campaign force and advertising focus, can rally with the more local races in November. I would agree with Keen, though, that this round goes to old media, or more precisely to television.
1/30 UPDATE: Belated tip of the hat to Mark Walsh at MediaPost (linked above in discussion of Borrell report) for his frame of "the Internet (as) the Dennis Kucinich of media outlets."
