If you are a political junkie, getting that daily fix doesn’t get any easier than right here in this town. Newspapers, magazines, blogs and 24-hour cable news channels serve up an almost inexhaustible supply of news and views to satisfy even the most hardcore addicts. For those who still can’t get enough, there’s always the lunch-time gossip sessions and dinner party circuit to look forward to. Amid this deluge, is there still room or appetite for more political chatter? Apparently so.
Enter Twitter, the popular social networking tool that lets users interact via 140-character messages, known as “tweets”, sent from phones or computers. The service is not new, having gained widespread usage as early as 2007. But for the past month or so, politicians, legislators and media personalities alike in Washington DC seem to have suddenly taken to Twitter, like a moth of a flame.
According to the TweetCongress.org website, about one-fifth of congressmen – that’s 73 republicans and 37 Democrats – now have Twitter accounts. Many news presenters and talk-show hosts also jumped on the bandwagon, seeing it as a potentially effective way of reaching viewers and newsmakers. Even Senator John McCain, who said during his failed presidential bid that he was computer illiterate and “never felt the particular need to e-mail”, has become part of Washington’s “Twitteratti”. The 72-year-old is in fact the most popular “tweeter” in Congress now with over 200,000 “followers”, due in no small part to his timely use of the online service to amplify and draw attention to his criticisms of a US$410 billion omnibus spending Bill filled with thousands of wasteful pet projects.
In between rants against the Bill on the Senate floor, he – more likely his asides – dashed off short “tweets” to highlight projects deemed to ridiculous. “US$100,000 for the regional robotics training center in Union, SC. Does R2D2 or C3PO know about his?” Mr McCain wrote in a humorous reference to the two robots in the Star Wars movies. On the serious note, he wrote one day before the Bill was to be signed into law: “Everyone should urge the President to veto this Bill. Let’s start over without (the pet projects).” The spending Bill was eventually passed with all the pet projects intact, despite the media attention that his “tweets” drew.
While “tweets” may not carry any political weight at the moment, analysts suspect that this might be more than just a fad. Case in point: ABC News chief Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos will attempt to conduct an interview with Mr McCain this week entirely via Twitter, in what’s being dubbed as a “twitterview”. “People always like new communication technology, so I think all these things are going to stick around,” said Mr Darrell West of think-tank Brookings Institution. “People love controlling their own communication, and these technologies allow these people to be mini-broadcasters.”
Fad or not, the pertinent question here is whether Twitter adds to the quality of the political discourse or helps to dumb it down another notch? In all fairness, Twitter is designed for immediacy and interactivity rather than depth. But for senior lawmakers and politicians who devote their time to this activity, as opposed to ansty teenagers who feel compelled to express themselves constantly, the question of the quality of their message is a valid one. Mr Howard Finberg of journalism training center Poynter Institute hit the nail on the head when he asked:”What is it that you are trying to say? If it’s a tool for communication, are you really communicating something or are you just chattering?
“Society has an excess of chatter, and a deficit of communication.” For the opposition Republician party in particular, this is no idle question. Since losing the presidential election, the party has struggled to define its vision in the era of Mr Barack Obama. The United States President’s ambitious agenda to retool the economy and tackle long-term reforms in areas like education, health care and energy, have come under criticism.
The Republcians called many of his ideas and proposals unrealistic, too expensive and downright socialist. But thus far, they come up with nothing resembling a coherent alternative. If anything, the party is in the news these days for the wrong reason – a damaging power struggle between stalwarts like radio talkshow host Rush Limbaugh, ex-House speaker Newt Gingrich, and its national committee chairman Michael Steele. New York Times columnist David Brooks weighed in with this comment:”If the Republicians wanted to do the country some good…they’d take the economic crisis more seriously than the Democrats.” One way to do this, he suggested, was to come up with ideas to support sectors of the economy that were still creating wealth, instead of carping about the current adminstration’s plans to prop up failing instituitions like Citigroup.
Try tweeting that.
Article written by CHUA CHIN HON (US BUREUA CHIEF OF THE STRAITS TIMES, March 16 2009