Apr 22

The Progressive Noise Machine: It’s Here!!

By Tracy Van Slyke
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impact

I’m supposed to be on vacation (I’m on a small island called Bonaire), but I can’t help myself. (So forgive me that I’m crunching what should be two posts into one.)   But I just read this post from Josh Levy from the PDF blog and the first two bullet points stuck out for me.  Both of these news items continues to fill out the concept of how the progressive media is having an impact on the political debate.   One is a specific case study and one is an analysis of the larger progressive  “noise machine.” First bullet point.

The Huffington Post continues to break campaign news. Late last week Celeste Fremon wrote about comments made by Hillary Clinton at a post-Super Tuesday fundraiser in which she blamed MoveOn and the “activist base” of the Democratic Party for her primary and caucus losses.

This story (a Huffington Post/Off the Bus collaboration) comes shortly after antoher OTB pro am journalist, Mayhill Folwer broke Obama’s “bitter” comment.  I don’t necessarily agree that the bitter comment was worth the amount of panting and dissection that the mainstream media gave it, BUT the fact that is that a citizen journalist’s work drove the MSM political news cycle for days.   Talk about IMPACT!   I think that this collaboration b/w HuffPo and Off the Bus, hits our “impact” categories of:

  • Uncovering the News
  • Pioneering New Journalism Models

What else do you think this collaboration has done? Here’s our “in development” list.

Second bullet point from Josh.

TechPresident’s David All is the latest to approach the question of why conservatives fall behind the left on the web. Likely reacting to the failure of Freedoms Watch to replicate MoveOn’s fundraising success… In doing so he links to another post from Jon Henke, another smart conservative strategist, about why MoveOn works.

I read Jon’s post.  Here are some highlights.

The Right has what might informally be called a “noise machine”, but it is a product of the time in which it was created: the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. It has never really evolved.

Meanwhile, the Left - in particular, the Progressives - have built a very powerful, very effective noise machine and they have built it both online and off. There are many cultivated (funded, strategic) elements to it, but the base - the underlying elements that make the cultivated, funded elements really effective - is basically organic.

Very true.  The power of the web has allowed progressives to take many of their grassroots/bottom up strategies for campaign creation and execution online.  Not only is that the right thing to do (hey–the people most effected by the issue gets to help decide what to do about it?!?), it has proven politically powerful.  Jon continues.

So why - with very rare exceptions - can’t the Rightosphere do that? Fundamentally, the Rightosphere can’t do that (effectively) because the Right doesn’t have the gravitational pull to draw candidates to its agenda. The Left has a well-organized blogosphere that can do three things for Progressive candidates:

  1. Messaging - between Moveon.org, the blogs and the many issue-advocacy outfits, the Leftosphere has a very powerful communication mechanism for candidates and issues. They have messaging and distribution capacity and it is well-coordinated with advocacy and awareness elements of their coalition.
  2. Money - the Presidential money is high-profile and not every candidate gets a lot of online money, but the Leftroots can move significant sums of money to the challengers that hit the right notes, make the right friends, and jump into the hot progressive issues. They have succeeded in tapping the long tail to move fundraising - and the financial incentive machine - outside of the establishment channels.
  3. Mobilization - the Progressives are passionate, energized, over their ideas. They have a story they’re excited about, they have effectively tied their stories together and they’re tightly wedded to the (dangerous) tactic of populism. They’re unified around that mission, so they can and do mobilize people. Again, that moves significant power outside the traditional channels.

The Leftroots can deliver messaging, money and mobilization, so Democratic candidates become path-dependent on them. They have sufficient power to move politicians to their ideas. The Right does not.


I agree with many of these points.  (YEAH!) But let’s not forget the fact that while the progressive’s developing media network is becoming quite influential, the right wing continues to dominate the airwaves and newspapers.  They’re model, while creaky and old, still holds significant power and is a larger mouthpiece.  It also continues to have much more funds (both in corporate dollars and individual donors) to get out their message and “journalism.”  Combine that with shoddy work by the MSM (hello ABC presidential debate?) progressives still have a long way to go to balancing the scales.  But I like where we’re headed. 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 7:07 am and is filed under impact. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 comment so far

[...] Build the Echo » Blog Archive » The Progressive Noise Machine: It’s Here!! Tracy is optimistic, but makes the good point that our new machine may be better suited for the future, but theirs is, for now at least, still more powerful. (tags: new.media new.politics build.the.echo huffpo moveon netroots) [...]

links for 2008-04-22 « andrew golis
April 22nd, 2008 at 7:56 pm

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