Technology Talks in Contentious Presidential Campaign

The ballot boxes may get the final say in this presidential election, but the Internet has been picking up the rest of the slack, from lecturing voters on the issues to leading them to the polls.

More so than any past race, the Internet has played a lead role in today's elections drama, playing host to thousands more political Web sites and acting as a messenger for millions more fund-raising dollars. In business stories that describe the trend, reporters describe this new high-tech mode of politicking as no less than transformative.

"The Internet has put back into politics what television has taken away -- the ability for people to connect," reporter Timothy Logue quotes one political operative as saying in his story for the Delaware County Times. "The commodity on the Internet is information, and information is power."

Logue says a story on a technological trend such as this works best when it doesn't attempt too much. "I try to keep things simple and let the quotes move the story along," he wrote in an e-mail interview. "If you reach, it becomes obvious to the reader you don't know what the hell you're writing about."

In other words, focus more on the technology's influence than its rudiments. And stories reflected that focus, speaking in plain language how the Web has become overpopulated by politics.

The North County Times reported that political Web sites have seen an astounding 400 percent growth since 2000 to near 6 million pages. According to the San Luis Obispo Tribune, 80,000 of those sites are political blogs, whose writers were credentialed for the national conventions for the first time this year, asserted The Virginian-Pilot. And the candidates are quick to hop on the bandwagon, both pulling aboard new electronic campaign managers who have enlisted 6 million supporter e-mail addresses for President Bush's Web site and 2.5 million for Sen. John Kerry's Web site.

For both candidates, "the Internet is a combination cyber headquarters, pulpit and money machine as they fight for the White House," writes Michael McAuliffe, staff writer for The (Springfield, Mass.) Republican. "As John S. Baick, an associate professor of history at Western New England College, sees it, '2004 might be the election decided by the Internet.'"

McAuliffe says he began reporting this trend by comparing the difference between Internet use today and anywhere from six months to four years ago. That framed the story of how the technology evolved along with the election.

"That kind of naturally advances the story. Otherwise, you're going over old news," he says in an interview. "But that's the place to start."

Then, reporters went much further. The (Rochester) Democrat and Chronicle talked about online voter registration drives. Another story in the Ventura County Star listed sites catering to the under-18 crowd. A few stories checked off the site, factcheck.org, a bipartisan site that confirmed or refuted candidate claims during the debates.

On the flip side of fact-checking, voters clicked on JibJab.com for animated parodies of the candidates singing a new version of "This Land" more than 60 million times, according to CNET.com.

On a serious note, in The Washington Post, reporter Brian Faher noted that the candidates "transformed their Web sites into virtual campaign offices" that offered stumping maps, polling locations, calendars of campaign events and checklists for campaign parties.

The inspiration for this transformation, several stories agreed, stemmed from another Democratic candidate, Howard Dean, who before the primaries had raked in an unprecedented $40 million in online donations and planned political parties through Meetup.com. Taking his lead, Kerry turned to PC-savvy donors for a whopping $82 million, compared to Bush's $13 million collected via the Internet.

"If the Democrats win, the Internet is part of the story," said a political scientist in a Toronto Star story by technology reporter Alexandra Samuel. "It's the place where they found each other and generated money."

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism