Everything’s changing…just not really. From Dan Farber of Cnet…
Barack Obama will be the most shadowed president in history, and it won't be just the Secret Service and press corps surrounding him.
Citizens and paparazzi armed with camera phones and a variety of other multimedia devices will chronicle every movement he makes in public and post it online.
He goes on to say…
Other presidents, including George W. Bush, have been similarly tracked online, but the Obama presidency brings a more finely tuned understanding to this phenomenon. Obama's pre-inauguration site, Change.gov, is providing its own play-by-play of Obama's activities, including briefly detailing the deli visit with a photo slideshow.
OK folks, a few facts here…
1. The man’s going to be the President of the United States. The President of the United States doesn’t step out the door without 20 cameras trained on him. There is literally no moment in his public life that isn’t recorded on film somewhere and that’s been the case since at least FDR.
2. Since the advent of camera phones and tiny digital cameras the President of the United States has been subject to private citizens taking his picture no matter where he goes. This has been the case since at least President Clinton’s second term.
3. The “play-by-play of Obama’s activities” is called the President’s Daily Schedule and it’s released to the public and has been since I was in High School (because one of my assignment’s in High School was to request one by e-mail). The Obama Team is publishing it online making it a tad more convenient than signing up for an e-mail distribution list but that still doesn’t make this new.
4. Change.gov detailed the Deli visit because it was a publicity stunt and the point of publicity stunts is to generate publicity.
Bottom line here is that nothing has really changed. Now whenever I post something like this I get the inevitable question: what’s the point of arguing over this? Why not just let them publish their puff piece?
Because when people like Mr. Farber get fooled by stuff like this we don’t get ACTUAL change. Every new administration since the beginning of time has wanted to look like they were changing things in Washington. Yet things rarely ever change.
The reason for that is because the press gets fooled into making a big deal out of nothingness which in turn gives the administration the PR boost they want and gives them no motivation to make actual changes. The hard reality is that Governments in general (not just the U.S.) want to obscure what they are doing from the public and have no motivation to do otherwise.
This isn’t necessarily nefarious it’s simply them wanting to work without the constant interruption of justifying themselves to a sometimes unreasonable public. But we as the public need to fight that because if they don’t have to justify themselves than it’s easy for them to do things that ARE nefarious (or set a precedent for the next administration that will).
Right now the Government’s of the world are winning. They’ve become pros at obscuring what laws they are actually passing while the public just ignores them because it’s too much trouble to dig through the obscurity. That’s why the majority of people were surprised by an economic meltdown that has been on it’s way for at least a decade. Because they just didn’t know a lot of these non-sense laws were being passed.
The online world could provide a remedy for that. But not if the press continues to be dazzled by the same information they’ve always gotten in a slightly better package.