The Media Fog

once you cut through it, the white noise is deafening


Most E-Mailed - International Herald Tribune, London

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Obama and McCain strive to break through media fog
By Adam Nagourney
Published: September 16, 2008

Yet that attack barely broke through the day's crush of blog postings, cable television headlines, television advertisements, speeches by other candidates and surrogates, video press releases, screaming e-mailed charges and counter-charges — not to mention the old-fashioned newspaper article or broadcast report on the evening news.

So on Friday, Obama tried again, this time with a rollout that began with the 6 a.m. release of two new attack advertisements, followed by a memorandum from Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, telling the world exactly what Obama was doing and why attention must be paid

That episode reflects what has emerged as one of the most frustrating challenges that McCain and Obama are facing going into the final weeks of this campaign: the ways in which the proliferation of communications channels, the fracturing of mass media and the relentless political competition to own each news cycle are combining to reorder the way voters follow campaigns and decide how to vote. It has reached a point where senior campaign aides say they are no longer sure what works, as they stumble through what has become a daily campaign fog, struggling to figure out what voters are paying attention to and, not incidentally, what they are even believing

Yet that attack barely broke through the day's crush of blog postings, cable television headlines, television advertisements, speeches by other candidates and surrogates, video press releases, screaming e-mailed charges and counter-charges — not to mention the old-fashioned newspaper article or broadcast report on the evening news.

So on Friday, Obama tried again, this time with a rollout that began with the 6 a.m. release of two new attack advertisements, followed by a memorandum from Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, telling the world exactly what Obama was doing and why attention must be paid

That episode reflects what has emerged as one of the most frustrating challenges that McCain and Obama are facing going into the final weeks of this campaign: the ways in which the proliferation of communications channels, the fracturing of mass media and the relentless political competition to own each news cycle are combining to reorder the way voters follow campaigns and decide how to vote. It has reached a point where senior campaign aides say they are no longer sure what works, as they stumble through what has become a daily campaign fog, struggling to figure out what voters are paying attention to and, not incidentally, what they are even believing.

Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for President George W. Bush's re-election campaign in 2004, said that given a proliferation of news sources — and the fact that so many once-trusted news organizations are under attack — campaigns would be wise to discard the standard playbook.

Dowd went so far as to suggest that McCain and Obama were wasting their money on television advertisements, and that they would be better off preparing for the coming debates. Those encounters, he said, are likely to be the only chance the candidates have at capturing the undivided attention of the public.

"At this point, the ability to create and drive a message narrative is all but impossible," he said.

"There's just so much stuff. The average person has 90 channels. They all get the dot-coms. They all get a newspaper. There is so much flow of information that they just to begin to discount it all."

Beyond that, he suggested, in this increasingly partisan atmosphere — one in which the dueling campaigns are accusing each other of lying, and where McCain has made an orchestrated attempt to discredit news organizations — voters are no longer as apt to accept what they hear as truth.

"They distrust — more and more — the marketplace of the campaign," Dowd said.
The formula was once transparent and established. Voters learned about the candidates through campaign advertisements, what they saw on the evening news, and what they read in national newspapers — like The New York Times and The Washington Post, which tended to influence what the networks covered — but also, even more importantly, on the front pages of local newspapers.

With the addition of so many other sources of information, the old formula, while not quite dead, is no longer so dominant in communicating information and shaping opinion.

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