Media power in the campaign

New web tools like social networking and high-quality video make campaigns more competitive, but other factors boost old media's power.

from the May 8, 2007 edition

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Who needs the old media anymore? Candidates can talk directly to voters and mobilize supporters. Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton even announced their candidacies with online videos.

Has the old-time media monopoly on the year leading into the campaign been broken? Not completely.

Weighing against the old media's power is an open field with a few presumed front-runners but no dominant candidate. The news media are trying to find one. When all is said and done, however, we may go into 2008 with baskets full of stories that have done little to winnow the field but left voters fatigued before a single vote is cast.

At the same time, another factor is in play that may have actually increased the press's power for 2008: an extremely compressed primary schedule. Some states, tired of seeing the power that Iowa and New Hampshire wield each presidential season, have moved up the dates of their votes. Because of those changes, and others proposed, by March 4, 2008, 40 states will have held their primaries – including the 10 most populous.

What would that mean? The long-shot candidates would be in a very difficult situation. That compact schedule would rob them of the two things they need: the time to catch fire with voters and the money that comes with a sudden rise in public consciousness.

The money to compete in this new, short primary season will probably need to be raised in 2007 before any votes are cast. And what determines who gets that money? Well, those things that went into the original formula: money (fundraising success generally feeds on itself), support of the party establishment (which has deep pockets), and old-media press coverage (which reports on the first two parts of the formula and feeds into them).

In other words, at the dawning of Web 2.0, when a growing democracy in media is allowing people and candidates to go around the old news sources, the group that have gained the most power in the 2008 election is not the candidates or the voters but … the old media.

Technology is a powerful force, but, ultimately, it's no match for the law of unintended consequences.

• Dante Chinni, a senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism, writes a twice-monthly column on media issues. E-mail him at Dante Chinni.

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