Political Statement or Entertainment?

A radio national correspondent’s report that aired this morning claimed that “the Internet is becoming increasingly influential in what's already a long US presidential campaign season” and suggested that the Australian election campaigns due this year will be similarly influenced by the possibilities presented by the internet. The main focus of the report was on an anti-Clinton ad posted on the online video-sharing network YouTube (shown below).



“[The ad]’s a clear sign that voter-generated content will affect the course of the 2008 Presidential election.”

But how great will the effect be? The average user-generated (and I would particularly like to distinguish between users and voters, as not all YouTube users are voters) YouTube video does not make any strong political statement – in fact, the majority of “political” videos document George Bush’s blunders, or take ever-increasingly generic jabs at conservative Christian principles. Videos such as “Evil Monkey a.k.a. George Bush” (shown below) or “George Bush Saves a Baby” (a cartoon in which George Bush eats a baby). Are voters (and bear in mind that 40% of Americans didn’t vote in the last presidential election) really so impressionable that their votes are based on cheap, home-made parodies. Please, give the Americans some credit.



The anti-Clinton video was created by a website designer who worked for the company that created Barack Obama’s website; however the Obama camp denies its involvement with the video’s creation. I wonder as to whether the issue of the ad, regardless of his denial of affiliation with it, will reflect poorly on Obama. Would voters be deterred by that kind of slanderous knock-out-the-competition advertising? Again, I point out that Americans are not necessarily as simple-minded as the George Bush Monkey video would have you believe.

The actual content of these ads is comparable to the political cartoons that appear in most newspapers. Just as different cartoonists choose to represent politicians differently, so will online-video makers. YouTube and other such programs allow for a greater expression of political statements, and each one will be slightly different. We will see a great quantity of these videos as we come closer to elections. In fact, it is likely that we will become swamped with such videos. But their main purpose is entertainment. Viewers are not swung this way or that by what they see on YouTube. If anything, the overwhelming number of videos will turn people off of political videos long enough for them to make up their own minds.