The Counter-Revolution Has Been Televised

John Perry Barlow's Conversation with his Friends

As the Dean campaign started to raise serious money and support on the Internet last fall, it became common for the likes of me to go around trumpeting that this election might be for the Internet what the 1960 election was for television.

In the wake of Iowa and New Hampshire, it seems evident that, once again, I'm too early with a prediction that may eventually prove accurate. If anything, this election may reconfirm the preeminent role of the idiot box in American politics, just as the Bush administration is demonstrating the power of plutocracy to an extent not witnessed since Karl Rove's political hero William McKinley was elected.

I have seen the past, and it still works.

Politics as usual was working like God's wristwatch in Iowa, where the RNC and various Republican PAC's outspent many of the Democratic candidates on negative TV ads aimed exclusively at Dean. But more damaging, in my opinion, was the remarkably open bias that the traditional media seemed to display against Howard Dean in their presentation of the news itself. I don't watch much television, but what little I've seen in the last month indicated to me that Dean was being systematically slimed.

I witnessed, for example, an astonishing are-you-still-beating-your-wife interview of Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi by CNN's Paula Zahn. Zahn persisted in drilling in on Dean's having said in an NPR interview that the notion the Bush administration had known in advance about 911 in advance was "an interesting theory," refusing, despite Trippi's protests, to read a bit further in the transcript to Dean's unequivocal statement that it was a theory he didn't share.

Dean was taken to severe task for having murmured something on Canadian television four years ago about flaws in the Iowa caucus system. Fox spent an entire day calling him a liar without ever being specific, in my hearing anyway, about what lies he had purportedly told. CNN repeatedly reported that some Iowa voters were referring to Dean volunteers as "Perfect Storm troopers." Indeed, in my extremely random sampling of TV reporting before the Iowa caucuses, I never heard a single reference to Dean that wasn't at least mildly derisive.

Then we had the yawp heard round the world. Dean gave a valedictory to his supporters in Iowa that was no more feverish, in my opinion, than many rally exhortations I've heard over the years, even from such sober fellows as Dick Cheney. Countless football coaches deliver such yells every fall week and yet are lionized by their fans. But, according to the big media, Dean's "yee-haaa" was the sound of political hara-kari. You would have thought they'd caught Dean in bed with either a live man or a dead woman. They belabored him for his shout as though he'd done something truly heinous, like, say, leading America into a major war under false pretenses, or robbing the poor to feed the rich, or dramatically curtailing civil liberties.

All the networks ran the tape like scenes from a terrorist attack, to the accompaniment of much tsk-tsking and head-shaking. Every pundit of any consequence proclaimed it Dean's last howl. But, as I say, I couldn't see what was so bad about it. Prior to this, Dean had seemed a little too tightly-wrapped for my tastes. I was heartened to see him display any emotion beyond justified indignation. But if you have a signal that can be heard everywhere and you transmit often enough the news that someone is crazy, just about everyone will start believing it, whatever the evidence.

This is especially true in a primary campaign where the leading criterion driving candidate preference is the ability to beat the incumbent. Given the relentless hammering he took from the media, Dean was lucky to get 26% of the New Hampshire vote. Even so, Dean may be done for. Or, more to the point, done in. Some will say that he strung his own rope, but it looked more like a media lynching to me. Assuming I'm right about this, why did television want to hang Howard Dean?

I may have an answer. It may be that, once again, we have met the enemy and he is us. By pre-announcing the possibility that this might be The Internet Election, we issued fair warning both to the traditional media and the big money politicos that a threat was at hand.

If Dean could actually raise enough money online to match in aggregate the much larger and fewer donations Bush has bought from the plutocrats with his tax cuts, it would shake the system to its rotten core. Worse, if information from the Web and the Blogosphere were to start defining enough personal realities to contest the great mass of tube-zombies at the polls, the gazillions presently spent on television campaign ads would start to wither. An enormous amount of power and money might be at stake.

MoveOn.org had them worried too. It is no mistake that CBS decided that the rather mild MoveOn contest winner was "too controversial" to air during the Superbowl. (Of course, there is no controversy in the message that drinking Budweiser will get you laid by beautiful women you aren't married to. Or in last year's ad proclaiming that smoking marijuana causes terrorism.)

So the empire struck back and it struck back hard, grinding the Dean point off our attack, leaving us with a field that consists of a nice guy who may have been in Washington long enough to dissolve his spine, two crypto-Republicans, a New Age mystic with a bad haircut, the champion of Tawana Brawley, and a sweetly telegenic southerner, about whom no one seems to know much of anything.

More to the point, they may have eliminated the candidate most likely to defeat George Bush, whose adventures at home and abroad are likely to make for another four years of riveting television.

Or have they? Howard Dean has hardly retired from the race, even though he will be running uphill from here. And it may be that the traditional media have done us a favor by beating some of the smug snot-nose out of us. One of problems with the groups that form on the Internet, the readers of this blog being something of an exception, is that they often end up being self-reifying fields of ideological homogeneity. We create our own ideological ghettos which seem much larger to us than they are.

Moreover, while many of us are convinced that the Internet is a powerful environment for organizing belief, it is also a great cacophony against which even the diminished voice of broadcast retains a kind of clarity. I believe I have just seen demonstrated the power of that signal. Can we create one of our own that is heard as clearly by the public in general? That remains to be seen. Now, at least, we know what we're up against.

Of course, there remains the possibility that the big media didn't beat Howard Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire at all. It may simply be that the new media failed to win. We may have been too glued to our monitors to remember that while elections get won by money - 12 out of 13 races in the last Congressional elections were won by the candidate who spent the most - they are also won by people on the ground. Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, we will have to work very hard, in dreary, traditional ways, to get him elected.

Some of us believe that another four years of the Bush Administration might turn America into something so oligarchical that it will make Mexico look like Sweden, so broke that the dollar will buy less than the Hungarian pengo, surveillant enough to make East Germany look like a good start, and puritanical enough to make Cotton Mather feel at home. Some of us want a president who is straight about his real reasons for sending our kids off to die and kill other kids, a government that is of, for, and by more people than will fit on the Forbes list, and a military that isn't simply a private security force for the Fortune 500. We want to give our grandchildren something more than a crushing debt and a country too stripped of resources and opportunities to pay it off. The stakes seem high to us.

But if we feel that way, and many of us do, we will have to knock on doors and persuade the folks inside to turn off their televisions and talk about what's really going on, just as we will have to turn off our computers occasionally to have such exchanges. If we are to restore democracy in America, we will have to get out amongst 'em and engage in it. I believe our arguments are persuasive, but we have to present them in person to the people who don't already believe us.

http://barlow.typepad.com/barlowfriendz/2004/01/the_counterrevo.html