I don’t write much about politics, because I tend to get myself into trouble. I can’t keep silent, however, about Barack Obama’s decision to move his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention next month from the 21-thousand seat Pepsi Center (where the rest of the convention will be held) to the 79-thousand seat Invesco Field, home of the Denver Broncos. Is there any doubt left that Obama is the rock star candidate?

The move is going to be expensive for the networks, but the pictures that will be transmitted will send a powerful message to the rest of America and the world beyond. The guy can draw a crowd.

The question is do we want a rock star for President? We’ve had an actor, a sex addict, and a Vaudevillian Act in there recently, so why not a rock star? America sends rock stars to stadiums around the globe, so why not let that image be our President?

We’ll have the drug overdose tent, man, the porta-pottys and the jackboot security teams, as the masses gather on the hillside one day waiting for a Woodstockian nirvana to descend upon the park. Reminds me of the day, man. Reminds me of the day.

The Obama “Change we can believe in” tour: coming to a stadium near you, fall of 2008.

Sigh. My age is showing.

I’m a little late to the game on this one, but…

In 2004, Chicago Sun-Times religion writer Cathleen Falsani interviewed freshman state legislator Barack Obama about his spiritual beliefs. Earlier this year, she republished the entire interview on her blog, and I just read it this morning. Fascinating stuff, and it explains his connection with both Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger. Of course, he’s had to distance himself from these folks now, and one can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened in those early primaries had his relationship with these two — and their inflammatory rhetoric — been made public sooner. Most pundits credited Hillary’s success in later primaries to the votes of women seeking representation, but I think — rightly or wrongly — Obama’s connection with these two men played a role.

Still, this interview provides an intimate look inside the spiritual beliefs of a man who may be President, and it’s a worthwhile read. I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what he said, and I think he was remarkably (and refreshingly) candid.

Young Broadcasting’s WRKN-TV in Nashville has terminated Adam Kleinheider, effectively ending a remarkably successful experiment in blog aggregation, VolunteerVoters.com — lovingly known in Tennessee political circles as v-squared. I’m sure nobody is happy about this, and it should rightly be viewed as a victim of what’s happening to mainstream media companies, and not about the quality of the political aggregator. It is, in my opinion, the type of site that local media companies need to be running for a whole lot of reasons.

As one commenter to Adam’s last post wrote, “If a mainstream news organization can’t sustain an objective political dialogue online, then I fear the horizon holds nothing good.” The site got respectable traffic numbers, but beyond the reach, it served a valuable function in the political journalism firmament in the state of Tennessee. I doubt the vacuum will exist for long.

That’s right. Barack Obama called ME last night. At my home. Early evening. He talked to me about voting today and gave me a number to call if I needed a ride. It was great, except I couldn’t seem to get his attention (or a word in edgewise). The connection was good, too. I just don’t understand why the guy would call and not let me say anything.

And I thought I was special.

UPDATE: He just called again. I’m beginning to think it might be a recording. Nuts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Now Michelle Obama has called. It was a nice change-of-pace. The race is close, she said, urging me to call my friends. Hello, friends.

A member of my tribe, Stanford Law professor and free culture champion Lawrence Lessig, is “considering” running for Congress from his home state of California. Pay attention, please:

(Thanks, Duncan)

I’m no economist, but…

We’re in the throes of a banking crisis due to bad decisions on loans. The credit crisis has never been worse. The dollar isn’t worth a dollar, depending on where you are in the world. The deficit has reached an all-time high. The national debt? Forget about it. Confidence in darned near everything is slipping.

And what does the government do?

It prints more money to give “rebates” (huh?) to taxpayers (um, don’t you actually have to pay taxes to be considered a taxpayer?) in the belief that it’ll help make everything better?

Call me a nut, but this is like 1+2=4.

(but I’m not giving my 300 bucks back, either)

There are two headlines back-to-back in Romenesko’s RSS feed today that speak volumes:

Plain Dealer didn’t bow to political pressure in blog dust-up
Denver Post skewers governor in rare front-page editorial

In the former, the ombud for the Cleveland Plain Dealer speaks about his paper’s decision to shutter its political group blog and fire a liberal blogger. His crime was supporting a candidate and writing about the same candidate on the blog. The paper’s policy is carved from the canons of journalistic ethics:

“You can’t contribute to a political candidate and then write about his or her campaign, either as an employee or as a paid free-lancer for The Plain Dealer, on paper or online.”

But Jeff Jarvis asks why they hired the bloggers and created the blog in the first place, if it was not to hear the opinions of involved citizens.

The logic of all this is baffling. The paper knew it was hiring opinionated people. But it didn’t want involved people. That is a “difficulty.”

What we’re really seeing is the view of journalism from inside the cloister of the newspaper: Once you take a dollar from the paper, once you take its communion, you are transformed: You take a vow of political celibacy. You have no opinions and if you do, you hold them to yourself, like impure thoughts. You don’t participate in your community but stand apart from it. And you don’t mingle with those outside the walls who speak the vulgate, blog. So the priests of the paper said that the bloggers were sinners. And they were excommunicated.

The second headline from the Romenesko feed tells the story of a Denver Post editorial that refers to Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter as “Jimmy Hoffa,” “a toady for labor bosses” and “a bag man for unions.”

These two stories are different sides of the same coin, and they both make a case for the return of argument to journalism. They point out the silliness of the line between personal, paid support and corporate editorial support. Purists will argue that the person who wrote the Post editorial didn’t or hasn’t supported an opponent of the governor, but I would argue that this is semantics because support is support, whether its in the form of cash contributions or otherwise. Others will argue that the Post editorial was well thought out and agreed upon by the editorial board of the paper — that elite group of educated and informed people who guide the decisions of the paper. No name-calling; just thoughtful prose. Not.

But what’s really sad about these two instances is how they are viewed by people watching from the outside — the people formerly known as the audience. Those people are arming themselves with personal media technology and speaking for themselves in ways that are not part of the canons. The Cleveland paper was right to try and display some of that in its group blog, but it was wrong to put it under its banner (and its canons). You can’t have it both ways, and the worst thing we can do is try and drag that which is new into the model that’s being disrupted. When will we learn that?

Just like everything else, the canons of journalistic ethics — and how we apply them to our work — need to be reviewed. Otherwise, we’ll be clinging to them — with looks of deep pride — all the way to the ocean floor.

How do I say it more clearly? Honestly, folks, we need better leadership than this in the seats of media power, and until that happens, we’ll just continue to miss the point, over and over and over again.

At an anti-piracy summit in Washington Wednesday, NBC’s Jeff Zucker actually called for AT&T and other Internet-service providers to install filtering software to, and get this, “weed out pirated content and unclog networks.” This is one of the most dangerous and desperate things I’ve ever heard come out of the mouth of someone who, among other things, is charged with certain responsibilities vis-a-vis the First Amendment. And the REAL PROBLEM is that this line was likely penned by the Telcos, not Zucker or his writers. I mean, come on! “Unclog networks?” Where have we heard that before?

AT&T would LOVE to filter the Web.

Tying piracy to clogged networks is simply ludicrous. The statement serves the best interests of those who want a tiered Internet, and if that happens, we can kiss innovation goodbye.

What Zucker and the other copyright crybabies want is to go back to the good old days, where money is made from the scarcity of content. And in these arguments, everybody overlooks the assumptions that support the arguments in the first place.

Here’s assumption number one: if we can control access to our copyrighted content, people will have to come to us to get it and pay whatever price we think the market will bear. And the underlying assumption of that is that our content is so great that people will follow whatever path we set for them. And, of course, another assumption is that the only value of new technology is multiple ways for us to monetize our content. It is with utter glee that Hollywood views the opportunities before them.

But along the way, something went wrong with the plan — the cash cow formerly known as the audience refused to play the game. Their refusal, however, isn’t demonstrated in stealing property — as Zucker and his friends would have us believe. People have found that they can live without it, and they’ve discovered — in significant numbers — that it’s a lot more fun to make their own stuff than to watch another episode of unoriginal original programming and a thousand commercials.

A Hollywood Reporter article about Zucker’s speech cites an air of desperation from the NBC Universal CEO:

“The unfortunate truth is that today we are losing the battle,” he said as he urged members of the Chamber to join the entertainment industry in a national effort to combat the threat.

“Our unified voices will carry far more weight than the pleas of the individual industries,” he said.

To back up his call, Zucker cited a study by the industry-friendly Institute for Policy Innovation study released Wednesday that found the impact of intellectual property piracy among all the copyright industries is nearly $60 million a year, cost about 373,000 jobs and $2.6 billion in lost tax revenue.

Perhaps in the old days we would believe such numbers, but let’s play the assumption game here again. Firstly, the “Institute for Policy Innovation” is a den of lobbyists, and in this case, you can bet they weren’t paid by the people formerly known as the audience. Hence, these numbers are simply pulled from the sky — built out of full-price scenarios and using audience estimates from God knows where.

And this whole anti-piracy message gets the attention of Congress, because copyright is our number one export. We entertain the world, so Zucker is very likely to get support from Capitol Hill.

When I was in Amman last Christmas, I wrote about street vendors selling DVDs of current movies — videos shot from a camera on a tripod in a theater. They sold them for $1.50 per DVD, and I assume these are some of the criminals that are robbing Mr. Zucker and his friends. I don’t dispute that, but think about this for a minute: Who buys these DVDs? Is it the people who could afford to go to the theater and watch the films?

The argument that, absent the DVDs, these same people will go to the theater to watch the movies is fantasy, and therein lies the rub.

Technology is blowing the whole entertainment world apart, and rather than seek creative — and profitable — solutions, the people who run the giants of the copyright cartel keep trying to pull the whole thing back under their control. They are joined by the giant Telcos, who are their allies in the command-and-control battle in Congress. If the Telcos can create a tiered Web, where only those with deep pockets get the quality bandwidth, then Zucker will have his wish. Bring on those “unclogged” pipes that are filled only with pirated property. While I’m sure he doesn’t think so, Zucker is actually a puppet in the hands of AT&T.

If a tiered Web happens, it will stymie innovation, but it won’t stop the personal media revolution. And this is the real problem that the studios don’t want to consider, because, well, anybody can produce crap.

And here’s the real kicker. The studios won’t make a dollar more than they are today. Not one single dollar.

You can take that to the bank.

I don’t get political very much, because I’d rather avoid the accompanying mud baths. However, this one is too much for me to keep quiet about, and I sure hope we get somebody in office next year who chooses to dismantle some of the stupidity that’s been put in place in the name of anti-terrorism in this country.

An absolutely frightening thing has been happening in our prisons, according to an article in the New York Times. By federal mandate in the wake of 9/11, “chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.”

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

…prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.

…A chaplain who has worked more than 15 years in the prison system, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is a bureau employee, said: “At some of the penitentiaries, guys have been studying and reading for 20 years, and now they are told that this material doesn’t meet some kind of criteria. It doesn’t make sense to them. They’re asking, ‘Why are our tapes being taken, why our books being taken?’”

Of the lists, he said, “Many of the chaplains I’ve spoken to say these are not the things they would have picked.”

Inmates are furious and lawsuits are pending.

The issue, of course, is this “approved list” and who is on the group of “experts” that the government tapped to create the list. According to the article, the effort has decimated libraries of some prisons.

Folks, this is not only a violation of the Constitution; it’s just plain wrong. But it’s the kind of totalitarian activism that I’ve come to expect from Washington in the past six years. Impotent to actually do anything constructive, we’re wasting our time and resources on foolishness like this. It’s like running over a wasp with a steamroller just to make sure it’s dead. It doesn’t matter how many other bugs get crushed in the process.

This is not what our country is all about. We’re actually destroying the very freedom that we’re trying to sell to other cultures. How dumb is that?

WARNING: Broadcast bias ahead (or not).

The title statement comes from a Wall St. Journal article today — “Political Ads Stage a Comeback in Newspapers” — that proves the difficulty of media organizations covering their own industry. Despite the excellent factual data provided, the piece still comes off as self-serving — so slanted that it’s vertical.

The story itself is a predictor of good things to come in 2008 for the newspaper industry.

At a time when many categories of newspaper advertising are declining, the political message is making a comeback. As overall spending on campaigns doubled to $3.1 billion between 2002 and 2006, the amount spent on newspapers, including their online editions, tripled to $104 million, according to PQ Media. The rate of growth appears to be highest in races for local posts, such as mayor and state legislator, because newspapers boast greater penetration and influence in small- to medium-size markets.

The article notes that despite the growth, newspapers account for less than 5% of advertising dollars spent on political campaigns.

But the Newspaper Association of America couldn’t have done a better job of writing what comes next:

Newspaper readers vote at above-average rates. Even amid circulation declines, newspapers in many markets reach an audience that is competitive with any single broadcast channel, a strength that online editions are bolstering. Online editions also are reaching a demographic group that their print editions have been losing — the young reader.

…Newspapers also allow for more sophisticated arguments than are delivered in the typical 30-second television campaign.

While I don’t necessarily doubt any of those statements, they are stated as fact without attribution in a publication that’s a part of the industry. This is why it’s so hard to cover media news from the inside, but if the WSJ doesn’t do it, who will?

Even when addressing conflicting evidence, the writer offers an apologetic:

A poll last year by the e-Voter Institute asked about 200 political consultants to rank nine media by effectiveness. The consultants ranked newspapers next to last, behind not only broadcast and cable television but also blogs, radio and direct mail.

That perception conflicts with polls showing that voters rank newspapers third, behind broadcast and cable television, as their primary source of political news and information, says Thomas Edmonds, a Republican political consultant who has studied the issue on behalf of the Newspaper Association of America. Moreover, surveys taken on behalf of the NAA have shown that voters rank newspapers ahead of other media in the credibility of their political messages.

Only one opposing viewpoint goes unchallenged, and that involves a national Democratic consultant who says the primary use of newspapers during a campaign is “trying to get good coverage.”

The article then goes on to note how broadcasters do a better job at basic sales, and that this is one of the reasons newspapers don’t fare as well when it comes to political advertising.

Like I said, it’s tough to cover yourself and be fair. But here’s another thought. Media critics would have a field day if one of the broadcast networks did a similar job on a piece involving political advertising on television.

When I first wrote about OhmyNews in South Korea three years ago, the organization had just played a pivotal role in overthrowing the conservative government in the country by using web and wireless tools to organize young people. I wrote a few weeks later that, “Some day soon, somebody is going to run a successful political campaign outside institutional politics.”

That day may be closer than you think, and I strongly recommend you keep an eye on the campaign of Congressman Ron Paul. His message resonates with a lot of people, and he’s wisely using the web to by-pass the information hegemony run by the mainstream press. I’m sure political insiders and observers consider the guy an extremist and a nut case, but one of the beauties of the web is that it’s not run by political insiders and observers.

This recommendation shouldn’t be construed to be an endorsement, but it’s hard not to like a guy who takes this approach to campaigning. His message is also uniquely appealing. Duncan Riley has an excellent piece over at TechCrunch that includes an embedded youTube video of Paul at Google. This kind of distributed media is exactly what’s taking place in the overall disruption of Media 2.0, and TechCrunch has a huge reader base. By my writing about Paul here, I’m passing the message, so to speak, and so it goes.

The Houston Chronicle reports today that Paul has “surprised” observers by raising nearly $2.4 million between April and June and ending the quarter with a similar amount in the bank.

The total is a remarkable showing for Paul, putting him in a better financial position — with less cash on hand but no debt — than Arizona Sen. John McCain. Paul still barely registers in public opinion polls and raised far less than McCain or the other leading Republicans. But his libertarian views and opposition to the war in Iraq have ignited a fire among nontraditional contributors, particularly on the Internet.

Don’t underestimate the guy.

In that essay on OhmyNews, I also wrote that real influence in a democracy lies with the people. With every day that goes by, the power of the people increases, thanks to the empowerment of knowledge and information made available via the web. I wouldn’t bet on the coming presidential race being like those of the past, and that includes where people put their dollars for advertising.

I’ve been graciously invited to participate in a brainstorming panel in New York on Friday sponsored by the RTNDF with assistance from the Carnegie Corporation and the meeting host Hearst-Argyle Television Inc. It’s a pretty lofty panel that includes some biggies in broadcasting and the web, including my friend Jeff Jarvis.

The topic is fascinating: what can broadcasters do to better their 2008 election coverage and include their audience? Here’s the way conference organizer Deborah Potter put it:

RTNDF has a new initiative called Digital Elections: Using New Media to Engage Your Audience. Our goal is to create a project that will enable RTNDF to help local stations use their digital resources to better inform and engage their communities, in an interactive way, during the 2008 election. By bringing so many bright minds together, we expect to use what we glean from this meeting to shape this important project.

Executives will be there from NBC, CBS, Gannett, Hearst-Argyle, Scripps, Univision, Nexstar, Public Radio and more.

So what should I contribute? What do you think I should tell this group? How can we use the web to better tell the election story and to involve users in the process?

The Washington Post reports that the Republican Party is playing catch-up when it comes to online strategies. There really isn’t much argument about this from a factual perspective, so the only real question is why.

One reason for the disparity between the parties, political insiders say, is that the top Republican candidates are not exciting voters the way the Democratic front-runners are. Another is that it takes a certain level of technical skill and understanding to be an online strategist, and Republicans admit that “the pool of talent in the Democrats’ side is much bigger than ours.”

But an underlying cause may be the nature of the Republican Party and its traditional discipline — the antithesis of the often chaotic, bottom-up, user-generated atmosphere of the Internet.

Here is my overly simplified reason for this, and it follows another institution’s failure to grasp the value of the web. The GOP’s values follow the modern era’s rules of order. It is very much the party of top-down thinking. While republicans complain about big government, the truth is they are the law and order party, the command-and-control group, the clique that needs to be in charge, with a tightly controlled organization that flows from the top.

This is a similar position of the evangelical church (see my post below), and this group has been noticeably absent from the cutting edge of the web as well. This is odd, because evangelicals have always been at the forefront of communications. Two of the first transponders on the first Satcom satellite went to Christian broadcasters, for example.

The reason these groups don’t like the web is that it’s not a mass medium. It’s much more bottom-up and grassroots, and the GOP doesn’t play well in such a postmodern cultural marketplace. Neither does the evangelical church, because God, the Father, is the ruler of their world. Pomos, as I’ve written before, much prefer the concept of God, the Holy Spirit.

In a similar way, the GOP only recognizes that which flows from the top. Late to the game? I’m not sure they even knew there was one.

(Thanks, Cory)

A new study from Burst! Media points to the growing perception that the web is going to play a significant role in the 2008 political season. I’ve written before about how we cannot take for granted that this election will bring in political revenue at traditional levels, and this study suggests that an online political strategy is a necessity for local media companies. One caveat: this is a study of 2,100 online users who are likely to vote in the 2008 Presidential election. It does not include those likely voters who don’t use the web.

One-fourth of likely voters told the researchers that the Internet is the best place to learn about a candidate’s position on election issues or to research general election issues.

Men are significantly more likely than women to cite the Internet as the best source for election information, 28.7% versus 21.1% respectively. There are interesting differences in the response of age segments. Among the youngest likely voter segment (18-24 years), television (27.6%) and the Internet (24.5%) reign supreme for election information. The Internet clearly leads other media among respondents 25-44 years, and newspapers lead with older age segments (45 years and older).

Here are some other fascinating stats from this study.

– One out of five (22.2%) likely voters have already visited a 2008 presidential candidate’s website.

– 30.0% have visited an issue advocacy group’s website. The affluent (income above $75k) are more likely (39.7%) than all other income segments to have visited an issue advocacy group’s website.

– One-quarter have clicked on a web advertisement for a political candidate or issue advocacy group.

– 50.7% of likely voters would watch a video clip on a candidates website featuring the candidate discussing his or her positions on election issues.

– Nearly one-third have visited the website of a candidate or issue advocacy group they did not or were unsure they’d support.

It must be stated that, as an online ad network, Burst stands to benefit from increased use of the web for candidate advertising, and that’s reflected in the study’s conclusion. However, this is what broadcasters are selling against:

The Internet provides candidates, advocacy groups and marketers with a “high touch” medium to reach new audiences and enhance existing constituent relationships. Furthermore, the Internet gives parties the opportunity to reach targeted segments in an environment that is highly engaging and, by the nature of politics, interactive. Take advantage of this environment by using creative and display technologies, like video, that not only provide substantial information, but also allow the consumers to easily pursue further research or action.

Given the significance of historical political revenue for television stations, it’s critical that we pay attention in this area. Candidate messages on YouTube, for example, cost them nothing, and there’s anecdotal evidence of their effectiveness.

Britteny, a Ball State University student, writing in the school’s “Notes from the Digital Frontier” blog, notes that YouTube is the new face of the political scene. “I actually think that this could actually do a lot of good in getting my generation more involved in politics,” she wrote, “and to make Americans in general more aware and more in control of their political expressions.”

If you don’t already have a political web strategy in place and functioning, you’re late to the party. Be forewarned that this is a dangerous position.

(Online Media Daily story)

The controversy over past rantings of two bloggers hired by the Edwards campaign has been interesting to watch. I won’t argue the merits of either side of the matter; I simply wish to make an observation.

Is there a better illustration of the differences between the IRL (In Real Life, for the uneducated) and URL worlds than this? The inflammatory statements written by these bloggers weren’t questioned in the least when they were first written. Why? Well, that’s just the way of the blogosphere. Anything goes here.

Sacred cows (especially those political) are mercilessly assaulted — and often in language that would embarrass a sailor — every minute of every day in the blogosphere, and nobody thinks anything about it. Caveat emptor. I find it refreshing, for I’d much rather know everything about the person I’m reading than to have it hidden by “cultural norms” or an institutional byline.

Not so “in real life,” where political correctness — with its rules of propriety and rightness — governs speech (it stopped being free a long time ago, BTW). In the real world, biases are withheld and hidden, as if they don’t exist or at least aren’t allowed to exist. Unfortunately, they do, and the best we have is that we don’t talk about them.

Human nature doesn’t stop being human nature just because the guy across from you wants to see a smile. Who’s the bigger threat to culture, the one who speaks what’s on her mind or the one who hides what she really thinks?

So writers who work in a space where they’re free to speak their minds are dragged into the world where speaking your mind is punished, and we’re surprised by this?

I’ve written a thousand times that the core disruption we’re all facing is cultural, not technological, and this event is just another chapter in that story.

To me, it’s not so much a case of “be careful what you say online” as it is a case of matter coming into contact with anti-matter. And anybody who’s ever watched Star Trek knows where that leads.

The folks at Pew have released a study of the internet’s impact on last year’s political campaigns, and the numbers raise a troubling question for 2008.

Twice as many Americans used the internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with the most recent mid-term election in 2002.

Some 15% of all American adults say the internet was the place where they got most of their campaign news during the election, up from 7% in the mid-term election of 2002.

So if it doubled last year, will it double again in 2008? I think that’s probably conservative, and what it means is that political ad money will shift as well. The question is what happens to the formula for revenue growth for local television stations, if a big chunk of political money goes to the web? If you’re a station owner or manager, what are you planning to get your share of that money?

The study also found that younger people view the web as a more important source of political news than newspapers.

While television and newspapers still dominate political communication for the majority of Americans, there is now a group of citizens who use the internet more than newspapers. They are relatively young — under 36 years old — and they have broadband connections at home. Some 35% of those in that cohort say the internet was their main source of political news during the 2006 campaign, compared with 18% who cite newspapers. For older broadband users, the internet still seems to be a supplemental source of political information and activity.

As I’ve often reported, we’ve fallen into a pattern over the last decade of broadcast revenue being off during odd years and up during years with elections and the Olympics. Given these numbers from Pew, it may well be that we can’t count on political campaigns to pull us through difficult times much longer.