Howard Dean on the Media

Yesterday I heard Howard Dean speak about the media and the presidential election.

Dean was quite entertaining, as he entered the small auditorium a number of the Yale Democrats held up Dean for America signs and cheered. Dean laughed, and said, "Wow, what a reception, it just makes me want to scream. YAAAAARRRGGH." He is very well spoken and quite charismatic.

He retold for us the story of the scream. There were 1,200 youths in the hall all disapointed after the loss in Iowa, and he wanted to go out and cheer them on. The noise was so loud that it sounded like he was next to a "jet engine." People in the back could not even hear Dean. After the pep rally ended, none of the press that were there even thought to mention The Scream in their news reports, since they had probably barely even heard it. But on tape the scream made Dean appear as if he was losing it since the microphone did not pick up the audience noise. The producers at the studio deliberately overruled the judgement of the reporters at rally and over the next week the scream was played on tv over 700 times.

Dean did not blame his loss on the scream speech. He said that with the way the primaries were designed, the winner of Iowa would win the whole thing, since the Democrats wanted a quick winner to rally around. It was Dean's failure to understand the Iowa caucus system to not get people to the polls that really cost them.

Dean also spent a great deal of time decrying against the consolidation of the media. He even thought that we needed to reinstate the FCC fules mandating equal times for both side of an issue.

I tend to disagree with Dean on this. With the proliferation of cable tv stations and with the explosion of the Internet, we are probably experiencing the greatest diversity in news media ever. The more serious problem is that no one has yet to figure out a business model that provides informative content with enough excitement to make money. However, this has been a problem as old as the Republic. I can possibly see how the FCC would want to limit media consolidation, since airwaves are a limited resource the FCC has a right to protect competition. However, I think that the Internet will soon make the problem irrelevant in a few years anyway.