Political Leanings

The announcement today of the launch of Campaign TV is perhaps an indication of how far political internet TV has come. Clearly partisan, it is launched at a time when there is increasing speculation that a flash election will be called in the UK. Arm's length endorsement seems to have become the key tool in a country with tight rules on campaign financing.

Of course, extensive use is being made of online video by the candidates for the primaries in the US where such restrictions do not apply (yet, anyway..), and channels such as iPSOE TV in Spain show how progressive politicians can become when they can get their faces on telly - even internet telly - even when they are already in power.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Highly ironic that when you click on the "debate" tab on this site, you get a little message saying "Coming soon..."

Clearly the people behind this site would rather pump out on-message propaganda than actually engage in a real debate.

Isn't this rather missing the point of internet TV?
Iolo Jones said…
A very good point, but there's probably room for both polemic and engaged TV on the internet. What's interesting is how conscious people are of when they are being 'sold to..'. Things have moved on since Howard Dean originally harnessed the blogsphere.
Anonymous said…
Fair enough - I agree there's room for both. The problem comes when one pretends to be the other, which is possible in an unregulated medium but gets you into trouble with Ofcom in the broadcast world. As long as the user is able to distinguish, perhaps this is not a problem, but as marketing via blog gets more sophisticated the boundaries are blurred. I'm hopeful that internet discussion is robust enough to point out propaganda sites for what they are, but I do fear that I may be wrong.