Is Anything Off-The-Record Anymore?

This YouTube video compiled a montage of the ’10 Most Awkward Political Gaffes’

While some of these clips were from back in the days before camera phones, camcorders smaller than the size of a deck of cards and ways to spread the clips you capture with those devices to millions of people instantly, in today’s world, political gaffes are being caught more and more often and spread to the masses quicker than ever before. People can instantly upload videos or pictures recorded on their cellphone to their twitter page or Facebook for all the world to see.
Most recently, President Obama was in the news when he made on off-the-record comment calling Kanye West a ‘jackass’. West got on stage and stole the mic from Taylor Swift accepting her award at MTV’s Video Music Awards to basically say Beyoncé should have won.
As soon as ABC reporter Terry Moran overheard Obama’s Kanye comment at an interview, he took to twitter. From there, the social media world instantly latched on to the gaffe and quickly spread the word via internet through Re-tweets of Moran’s twitter comment, links, podcasts and blogs, reaching journalists and reporters at all the major news sources around the globe.
With that, an off-the-record comment became a top story on the 5 o’clock news.
While ABC was later forced to apologize for their exploitation of Obama’s little comment, the damage had already been done.
Still, Ben Smith of Politico noted this particular gaffe to be less harmful than others, as it gave Obama the chance to say what most average Americans were thinking.
A few days later, gaffe-prone Vice President Biden chose to keep his mouth shut regarding the comment…a smart move in my opinion.