Commentary

Where's The Politically Devastating Streaming Video?

As  heated and unbelievably nasty as the presidential race has been, it is surprising the campaigns haven’t been victims or perpetrators of some ugly, live streamed video.

But it is still early in the campaign season.

Donald Trump hammered 16 other GOP candidates through the primaries, but videos of the sort that campaigns don’t want to see really didn't surface. At least nothing that caused a ruckus.

Worst--and it was pretty bad--were videos from Trump campaign events at which dissenting spectators, or just ones who looked suspicious (because they were black or Hispanic) were roughed up or ridiculed.

But what we haven’t seen--or have I missed?--is video of candidates with their public-image masks off, saying or doing things their handlers wouldn’t want out there. We should have expected it by now. Periscope and Facebook Live and Snapchat are all things that didn’t even exist, (or barely did), during the last presidential season. Where are the early maladjusted adopters?

As I’ve mentioned before, had Periscope or Meerkat been around and live streamed Mitt Romney’s campaign-sinking “47 percent” speech to wealthy donors, that explosion of bad press would have happened sooner than it did. (Or not at all. If it had been streamed live, a Romney partisan could have quickly hi-signed Romney to ixnay his speech in which he contended that 47% of voters feel they are dependent on the government to get by.)

Every campaign assigns staffers to follow around the opposition candidate looking for the stupid misstatement--or unintentionally spilled honest opinion--to be blurted out. It is so everywhere that two Democratic primary candidates for Congress visiting my township (pop. 4,804) for a meet and greet, had to warn the crowd a Republican spy was planted in the crowd. When I heard that, I almost did a spit-take with the stick of hay I was chewing.

Maybe we’ll still see the fruits of that video “opposition research” as the campaign moves forward. And maybe we would have seen live, ugly video of protesters clashing with police and each other in Cleveland, but protesters and the police did the unthinkable and were respectful (enough) to each other. The live video by one newspaper reporter in the midst of a protest was hard to watch, but only because he was walking as he shot it, and nothing was happening.

Yes, shoes were stepped on. 

Inside the hall, the few angry delegates didn't seem to be in any big rush to record. 

There’s still the whole rest of the race waiting to unfold, and of course, the Democrats, coming this week to Philadelphia.  

The Democratic National Committee is using Internet technology to seamlessly connect backers with causes, reports Philadelphia Magazine.  A Philly start-up, Curalate, will connect users of a curated-feed of convention photos under #demsinphilly on Instagram to information about an issue related to what or who is in the photo.

The magazine reports that, as an example, when a user clicks on a photo of Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards speaking, they’ll be taken to a site where they can sign a petition arguing for reproduction rights. To me, that sounds like several steps and a lot of effort that frankly, I can’t believe many will take advantage of. But maybe I’m missing that vision thing.

I’m working more in the gutter, frankly, where the campaigns already are firmly entrenched and no doubt bound to be getting dirtier.  That’s not a good place to be without any filters on your video but that's what this election will be all about, eventually.


pj@mediapost.com

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