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.

Internet & The Obama Campaign

We hear it time and time again in our media studies and political communications classes: Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign revolutionized the role of internet in American politics. According to a June 5 piece in PR Week by David Singleton entitled ‘Conference News Praise for Obama Strategy’, Jeremy Hunt explained that Obama’s internet strategy was unlike anything any political party had ever done before.

A Pew Internet and American Life study on the Internet’s role in the 2008 campaign discovered many interesting statistics on the public’s involvement online throughout the campaign.
According to the study, 2008 was the year that the internet became equal to newspapers and far-surpassed radio as an important source of political information for the American public and over half of all American adults went online to search for information or get involved in the political process during this time.
About one in five internet users shared their personal opinions on issues and the candidates with others by commenting or posting questions on these social sites and one in three users forwarded content to others, according to the study.

Almost half of the internet users watched political videos online, according to the Pew Study. This video by the Obama campaign, with more than a million and a half views on YouTube, got a variety of well-known celebrities to perform his speech in an uplifting way that would make any PR team proud. I clearly remember watching this during the campaign and instantly wanting to know more about Obama and what these celebrities who I admire saw in him and his political views.