Digital empowerment (the technology and the connective reach) also makes everyone a potential gadfly. American city councils and school boards are learning this lesson. The gadfly constituent who follows a special issue no longer needs column inches from the local newspaper to be heard. She can take on the mayor via her blog. In fact, as newspapers cut back on coverage or disappear, the gadflies become even more important as a means of challenging and investigating local government corruption, nepotism and other malfeasance.
Politicians are exploring the new technology's capabilities, and not just mayors hounded by gadflies. In late April, the White House started its own video channel, which ran a "self-report" of President Barack Obama greeting the NCAA champion University of Connecticut women's basketball team. ABC-TV White House correspondent Jake Tapper felt stung and abused when the video appeared. "Just like a network, they have their own little logo!" Tapper wrote on his blog. "Actual reporters," Tapper complained, were excluded from the ceremony. Tapper dubbed the White House's Web channel "OTV" (Obama television).
Tapper's complaint was the stiffest the White House received. Otherwise, national media remained mute and tame. Now the White House has done it again, this time using former ABC-TV reporter Linda Douglass as its spokeswoman. The video appears on the White House's official Website and attempts to rebut a story that appeared on The Drudge Report (drudgereport.com and Breitbart.com). The White House identifies Douglass as a communications director -- but Tapper is right, this is OTV.
And why can't the president have his own channel? With current technology -- cameras, computers, Web software -- everyone else can, too.
YouTube, Pajamas Media's PJTV (full disclosure: I appear on its "National Security Review" program) and similar Web-based video outlets evade the control of "legacy" television network editors and producers. No one evades criticism and scrutiny, however -- not on the Internet.
In a sense, the Internet has millions of fact-checkers distributed throughout the world -- hence the term "distributed genius," where digital connectivity allows people to connect quickly, examine information and share expertise.
The Internet has loosed a billion tongues on a million channels, and the ayatollahs, network anchors and other partisan control freaks are not pleased.