As we're in holiday mode here at On the Hill, thought I'd rummage through the archives to find some interesting old stuff. Here's one: A post from Christmas in 2003, a few weeks after Howard Dean, then gunning for a chance to represent the Democrats in the 2004 U.S. presidental election, was discovered using something called the Internet to raise money and build support. Elite Beltway journalists pooh-poohed the Internet as a political tool and were promptly warned by New York Times columnist Frank Rich, New York University media critic Jay Rosen and then San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor that they were dangerously missing the boat. Here's Rich, writing in December, 2003:
… the rise of Howard Dean is not your typical political Cinderella story.
The elusive piece of this phenomenon is cultural: the Internet. Rather than compare Dr. Dean to McGovern or Goldwater, it may make more sense to recall Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. It was not until F.D.R.'s fireside chats on radio in 1933 that a medium in mass use for years became a political force. J.F.K. did the same for television, not only by vanquishing the camera-challenged Richard Nixon during the 1960 debates but by replacing the Eisenhower White House's prerecorded TV news conferences (which could be cleaned up with editing) with live broadcasts. Until Kennedy proved otherwise, most of Washington's wise men thought, as The New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in 1961, that a spontaneous televised press conference was “the goofiest idea since the Hula Hoop.”
Such has been much of the reaction to the Dean campaign's breakthrough use of its chosen medium. In Washington, the Internet is still seen mainly as a high-velocity disseminator of gossip (Drudge) and rabidly partisan sharpshooting by self-publishing excoriators of the left and right. When used by campaigns, the Internet becomes a synonym for “the young,” “geeks,” “small contributors” and “upper middle class,” as if it were an eccentric electronic cousin to direct-mail fund-raising run by the acne-prone members of a suburban high school's computer club. In other words, the political establishment has been blindsided by the Internet's growing sophistication as a political tool…
You can read my post — The Internet and political journalism (Dec. 24, 2003) — and find the links to the Rich piece and to Rosen's piece. It seems, sadly, that the link to Gillmor's piece has gone stale.