We previously talked about how there is more at stake per seat than ever and that the traditional way of spending money is already undergoing change and likely to see even more radical changes over the next couple of years.
This raises all sorts of interesting questions, namely, who, where and how does one spend election money.
Fifty years ago, when NBC, CBS and ABC were in some sort of gatekeeping role, it would be difficult to place an advertisement around elections that didn’t meet their standards. The Federal Election Campaign Act, for example, makes it illegal for a foreign national or a foreign organization or government to try to advertise for elections.
This kind of act would be much easier to enforce fifty years ago, not only as ABC, CBS, and NBC were not likely to break any such rules, but even if someone just went near the rules, it’s pretty hard to imagine Walter Cronkite, going to commercial break spouting something such as “and now a word from our sponsors over at the Society for Socialism…” or anything similar without mass outrage.
The comparative lack of choices in advertising, and the general barriers to getting a media organization up and running back then that even had the potential to reach a million people or more kind of ensured that we had a very good idea as to who was trying to influence our elections through their money.
Today, those barriers are gone. Anyone, including this rube, can start a website and hit the publish button. If you would just like to place an ad on some other site, it’s very easy to hide who you actually are.
Confounding things further, in the old days, it would be pretty hard to imagine that graffiti over a Vote for Eisenhower Billboard would have much of an effect. Today, the equivalent a somewhat innocuous article on a more traditional news page can be besieged with a dozen comments coming from cyber armies around the world, presumably with fake but polished Facebook accounts, and it would be very hard to tell those people apart from disgruntled people or random trolls domestic or abroad.
Entire websites can easily be either funded for or actually run by groups of people that are not American and don’t have America’s interest at heart. Zero Hedge, a financial site with a bearish slant, that has hundreds of thousands of readers (or at least used to have that), is pretty much assumed to be a Russian propaganda front.
The reality though, is even ignoring the Russian Elephant in the room, it’s clear that anyone, anywhere can try to influence elections in the United States, and since the previous means for reaching a bunch of people at once are becoming less effective, we’re losing, to an extent, the ability to have gatekeepers for better or worse.
Our ability to consume information is also no longer bound by location. Getting, for example the Manchester Guardian (now just called The Guardian) delivered to your door in St. Louis, Missouri was probably damn near impossible 30 years ago. Now, you can get this respected, well left of center newspaper every day from anywhere with an internet connection. They in some way too are trying to influence the discourse.
There are so many new sites springing up constantly, it’s hard to tell what the goal is beyond what is stated.
The traditional gatekeepers still have some power, as in who gets invited to debates, who gets media coverage in general, but this is eroding at a rapid rate.
Lastly, the final factor that truly confounds everything, and I think is a force multiplier on the above three factors is the “hidden” marketing.
This can of course extend to election advertising.
Many of these methods of course have been well known for a while.
There’s the product placement method, as seen here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1743720/
Relevant to product placement, is the opposite, where you affiliate an infamous star with the brand of your rival, for example, luxury bag designers sending competing products to MTV Reality Starlet “Snooki”
It would be possible to imagine some sort of sketch or show where a pantomime-villain type on a tv show or a sketch is deliberately associated with out of fashion brands and also has a poster of a candidate someone wants to undermine.
People know about the concept of astroturfing, or fake grass roots organizations. Sorting through what is an astroturf, what’s a legitimate grass-roots organization that just happened to be founded by a billionaire and what’s started from the ground up is hard to tell. All three organizations need some money after all.
We’ve had gaming of google search results to influence auto-fills, and there are strategies that I’m probably too dumb to realize are being used (possibly successfully!) on me right now!
The net result is simply dizzying, elections everywhere will be influenced by people from all corners of the globe, in all manners necessary, and with the stakes so high it will be non stop.
The final part of this series will talk about McCain-Feingold, McCutcheon vs. FEC, why none of that would even matter today, and ideas for dealing with this new world.
Thinking With Dan 