12
Jul
Strange Bedfellows
Tired of the incessant, highly partisan bash fest that has poisoned America’s political process and media ecology for most of this century?
Surprisingly, so are some of the most prominent practitioners at the center of the divisive, vituperative, redstate/bluestate, you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us school of discourse - top-level media and political strategists from across the political spectrum.
These very strange political bedfellows are joining together in a post-partisan attempt to do something about the vitriol and mindless spin of modern political campaigning that they helped to create in the first place.
The group – which includes President Bush’s top media and political strategists, as well as top advisers to former President Clinton and would-be presidents Gore and Kerry – just announced the October launch of a social-networking Internet site called Hotsoup.com.
Talk about hot soup – that’s just in time for the elections!
The online information play, to be edited by former Associated Press chief political writer Ron Fournier, is the spawn of an unlikely coalition that counts among its founders Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, and his rival Joe Lockhart, senior adviser to Democratic Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign (and former White House press secretary under President Clinton.). Their concept is to create a grown up, more politicized version of MySpace.com, and to target “opinion leaders” around the country who use the Internet to help make up their minds. Hotsoup would connect these local opinion leaders – estimated to number 30 million - with influential, high profile newsmakers who will post essays, debate issues and respond to readers.
To what end, you might ask? “We all share the belief that partisanship is largely driven by a debate that lacks information and lacks context, and we think this community can provide both of those things,” Lockhart told the Associated Press. http://www.forbes.com/business/energy/feeds/ap/2006/07/11/ap2872477.html
Other Hotsoup co-founders include Mark McKinnon, the former Kris Kristofferson staff songwriter turned genius media maven who directed two highly successful advertising campaigns for President Bush, Carter Eskew, chief strategist to Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, and Allie Savarino, president of the online women’s social networking site Sisterwoman.com. They and a handful of other co-founders are Hotsoup’s sole investors, who hope to garner advertising support from telecommunications companies and publishers, as well as, they say, financial institutions and auto makers.
The site is aimed at consumers who “feel like they have something to say but can’t get it past the filter,” Lockhart told the Wall Street Journal. http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2006/07/11/sweet-and-sour-no-doubt
Oddly, however, he and the rest of the group introduced their venture at an invite-only press breakfast attended by top political reporters for such MSM stalwarts as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Time magazine.
I would have liked to have been there – but I couldn’t get past the filter! Anyway I’m certain that I’m not among the celebrities, big-name politicians and business leaders the start-up’s founders promise to employ in an attempt to attract hoi polloi like us into discussions. Frankly, I’m not even sure I rank among “America’s 30 million influencers” which Hotsoup is targeting…
Lockhart and the other Hotsoup embeds suggest that their effort was born from a shared disgust with the increasingly shrill, unbalanced and personalized shouting that too often substitutes for intelligent debate and discussions these days. The irony, of course, is that their own political work played a large part in creating and perpetuating the undemocratic polarization they now decry.
Bottom line: does the world (online or off) really need another social network? How will Hotsoup differ from already extant group sites like the Huffington Post or the revamped Townhall.com? And with a world already populated with MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and Gather.com, do we really need another media site that gives users a forum to express their views on issues in the news – especially one aimed at reaching ‘opinion leaders’ through celebrities and big-name politicians?
HOTSOUP hopes it will unite “two types of Opinion Drivers:” The famous personalities who appear in newspapers and on TV, AND the 30 million “PTA members, firefighters, homemakers, small business owners, non-profit directors and other grassroots influencers.” Lockhart says it will become ” the place policy makers and political elites get to make their case to a public who increasingly feels shut out of the entire process. But to be heard, they’ll have to check their partisan spin at the door and address the issues the HOTSOUP.com community decides are important.” The community, he maintains, “will demand constructive debate and real solutions to real problems, not the contrived debates and fact-challenged banter that paralyzes our political and policy discourse.”
“This is about granting equal access to all parties,” adds co-founder Mark McKinnon.
Editor-in-chief Fournier goes even further. “Hotsoup.com is the next big thing in modern communications and community, It’s the new frontier of New Media,” he boasts. “Like the Internet itself, it will be the great equalizer. It will place every member of the community on a level playing field and let them sound off, square off, and connect with fellow Opinion Drivers.”
The next Next Big Thing? We’ll see, I suppose – after all, this IS the Internet, where high hopes and well laid but vainglorious plans “aft gang agley,” as Robert Burns would have posted. For the moment, however, the venture most reminds me of the old Beatles song “Baby You Can Drive My Car.” The lyrics, you may remember, go something like this: “I ain’t got no car/and it’s breaking my heart/but I’ve got an Opinion Driver/ and that’s a start.”
Who will be listening?
July 12th, 2006 at 6:36 pmDig deeper, Rory. There must be some other agenda for this group, although, for the life of me, I can’t discern it. I did, however, check out Sisterwoman.com, which has nothing to do with politics or feminism and everything to do with celebrities. It’s almost as though mainstream media is in a conspiracy to keep things as superficial as possible, and when Karl Rove engineers his next wholesale distortion, they’ll go, “Oh my, I suppose we didn’t see that coming, but you have to admit he has a point.”
July 13th, 2006 at 5:59 amthe word isn’t ‘irony’, it is ‘hypocrisy’: that it is many of the power elite players and their technokrats who condoned, perpetrated, and are the chief practioners of our bereft political discourse who are now declaiming a content-free public dialogue, is hypocritical, not ironical…
further, it isn’t necessarily the ‘name-calling’ and other ‘personal attacks’ that i excoriate, it is the TOTAL LACK OF SUBSTANCE, rational argument, or actually addressing the issues which is the meat of the matter…
*somebody* was snarky, who was snarky first, you were, no, you were… oh no! boohoo, i’m traumatized! blahblahblah, who cares?
what was the point made (if any), and *WHAT SUBSTANTIVE ARGUMENT* was made, other than to be snarky in return ?
i don’t mind the snark if there is some there, there…
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
July 13th, 2006 at 6:24 pmYeah. This is just what we need. These people have played a large part in getting us where we are now. They could give a flying f–k about parties, about the country. They want to be clever. I’m just an ol’ southern girl. And I say, with everything in me, “Screw em.”
July 13th, 2006 at 7:38 pmThe statements from Gingrich and Bush Sr. were meant to establish that,of course, the Iraq war is a crime and the current regime is getting away with it.
July 13th, 2006 at 10:19 pmOn the surface it may sound like a good idea. But in order to be BELIEVABLE each editorial would NEED a bibliography to back any facts, otherwise it becomes the same old talking points, and most of us who CAN READ BETWEEN THE LINES, see right through it.
What would be really wonderful is if we had a cable news network, run by REAL INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS, interested in presenting the FACTS, not truthiness. What they have now, at it’s best, gives us two sides of an issue; more often than not, it’s becomes a bully pulpit for the pundits representing corporate America.
July 13th, 2006 at 10:32 pmThe honorable opposition is dismissed not just by the right wingers, but by the pretend journalists themselves.
It all comes down to money, from the pretend journalists, to the guys who own the networks, to the politicans and lobbyists who are being paid by the SPONSERS who are CORPORATE AMERICA.
Remember back when TV shows would say that this show is sponsered by such and such a company? Now you can honestly say that our government is SPONSERED BY CORPORATE AMERICA.
You might as well take that part out of the Preamble that says FOR the people and replace it with FOR CORPORATE America.
Corporate America is like a parasite, constantly looking for it’s next meal, irregardless of anything or anyone. These parasites have just about destroyed everything that made America the most desirable government in the world; all they had to do was eat away at the Bill of Rights, slowly, as not to be really noticed and BANG, we’re back to 1776 , only this time our ENEMY IS WITHIN and the NSA is helping them.
All these people who have helped create these bogus arguements to
put a better face on Corporate America should be in jail for preventing America from creating a MORE PERFECT UNION!
…AND now you are going to make a website to try and undo all you have done? It’s just not believable! Are all of you still taking paychecks and continuing to spread the same BS?
One more thing, there might be millions of shareholders in Corporate America, but how many people have enough vested to make a difference in their lives? Most of us barely make enough to keep up with the cost of living, let alone buy 1000’s of shares of stock(yes, we know that’s some of the BS talking point).
What all of you BS’ers will come to understand is that 80 percent of us make your paycheck possible and as you help make our paycheck smaller, eventually you will be a loser too….if there is G-d.
My gut tells me that it’s more of the same except with a different slogan using a different medium. A new style monopoly that is attempting to appear as something it’s not, trying to tap into the internet. I don’t have much faith in the big names that also were so instrumental into throwing BS spin to the American public for so long, which is why we are where we are today.
July 14th, 2006 at 6:28 amI registered for their news letter , not because I am in need of carefuly crafted news, I merely want to see how they project what they want us to see. VeryInteresting , however, I believe it is a group of strategists that has figured out a way to tap into the social political fabric of the internet.I suspect we will be see more of these pseudo types of groups over the net leading up to the elections .But I believe that it will be American grass roots people that will change the way the government is doing business, not the handlers of past campaign organizations. Time will tell and maybe the group will prove me wrong, though I highly doubt it.
There will be plenty to talk about. Business and environmental leaders, for example, have voiced concern about the growing cost of natural disasters.
October 5th, 2006 at 2:55 amI suspect that’s thereason general public want to read blog….Internet visitors generally create blogs to declare themselves or their secret views. Blog grant them same matter on the monitor screen what they specifically needed,so as the above stuffs declared it.
March 14th, 2007 at 3:28 amPolitical interests can bring together people who otherwise have little in common.
July 5th, 2007 at 4:24 am