Top > Webmaster > 2006 > October > 2006-10-20

YouTube to Have Huge Impact on US Political Campaigns

Politicians in the United States have found an innovative way of exposing the bad sides of their rivals. They hire trackers ? people armed with video cameras ? whose job it is to track their political rival?s every move, in the hope of getting a good scene of the rival doing something politically incorrect or just plain stupid. The video scenes are then spread like wildfire on the web, using internet video-sharing sites such as YouTube.com.

Political analysts say that spreading these video scenes to hundreds of thousands of viewers can have a huge impact on political campaigns in the United States. It is well-known fact that a few seconds of a real-life video shot carries much more weight than a written newspaper report. Already, videos are doing the rounds of politicians napping during important congressional meetings or even making racial slurs.

The latest political ?victim? was Republican senator George Allen of Virginia who was caught on camera making a derogatory remark to an African-American tracker sent by his rival, James Webb. Thousands of people have already seen the video where Allen points to the tracker and calls him a ?macaca? ? an African word for monkey and often used as a racial insult against people of darker color. The incident boosted Allen?s campaign substantially and has already caught the interest of Democratic activists who hope to make use of the video scene in other campaigns.