Thanks to YouTube and super cheap recording equipment, recent years have brought on the meteoric rise of activist gotcha video “journalism.” The most famous examples have turned out to be heavily edited and manipulated, of course—think James O’Keefe’s damning ACORN prostitution vids and the also-Breitbart-helmed NPR fundraising "expose"—but the allure is still there, maybe stronger than ever.Campaign strategists lick their chops at the prospect of catching a political rival unawares and behaving badly on grainy Flip cam video, of revealing embarrassing details about their personal lives with a digital ambush. After all, it’s cheaper and easier than ever to give some staffer a handheld HD camera and sic them on a candidate. Hence the the rise of “trackers,” professional political operatives who do little more than follow their campaign’s foes around and hope to catch them slipping up.The fruits of such labor stand to resonate widely. Here, for instance, Rep. Bob Etheridge from North Carolina lost his shit when a couple obnoxious college kids stuck a camera in his face:That helped cost him his job. And ThinkProgress has captured a number of moments like this, wherein Senator Scott Brown is seen directly asking David Koch for campaign cash:That made Massachusetts voters uneasy, knowing their “centrist” senator is in the pocket of right-wing oil barons.So it isn’t really surprising that Politico reports on the tactics of Democratic trackers who have been following politicians around and staking out their homes. Campaigns for both Democratic and Republican candidates have been doing this for a while now. What is somewhat surprising is how incredibly worthless the stalker videos they’re posting on YouTube are.Feast thine eyes, for example, on the groundbreaking detective work completed by the opponents of Wisconsin GOP Rep. Reid Ribble:That’s his house! He owns a house! And it’s brown and pretty modest! Or check out this exclusive footage of Ohio Rep. Jim Renacci’s home, taken by Democratic operatives—your life may never be the same:Okay, seriously. Yeah, it’s kind of a big house I guess. And Democrats say they’re going to use that fact to help paint the candidate as out of touch. But what’s more out of touch: a guy who lives in a big house, or the guy who takes terrible, shaky-handed videos of that house and uploads them to YouTube?That’s what’s so bizarre about all of this: Why even post this worthless material to YouTube at all? The point is to catch the politicians doing something embarrassing, to reveal something illuminating, right? All that Democrats are doing here is providing their foes with a handy “liberals are invading my privacy” meme that Fox News has already run wild with. I cannot fathom, for instance, why anyone would ever actually upload this following video, in which California Democrat staffers actually surreptitiously follow GOP challenger Ricky Gill around town:How does this accomplish anything at all besides make you look extraordinarily creepy? Seriously, what the hell are you doing, Democrats? Just because you take some crappy handheld video doesn’t mean you actually have to publish it online—gotcha activism kind of means you’re supposed to wait for an actual gotcha moment, right? I mean, it’s almost mesmerizing how bad these videos are; they are almost impressive in their absolute dearth of value.Despite opportunistically taking to the media and whining about the invasion of their privacy, the GOP has no moral high ground to speak of, considering they do the exact same thing—they just seem to be a hell of a lot better at it.This is the new reality, sure. Privacy is gone, and that goes double for public officials. Google and Facebook may be taking logs of everything we layfolk do online, but politicians are certainly aware that better, cheaper tech has enabled nonstop surveillance of their meatspace, too. We’re on our way to a transparent society, maybe, but even that’s going to need a better filter.
Advertisement
Advertisement