>> this is "the chris matthews show." [captioning made possible by nbc enterprises] brave new world. the cell phone cameras changed politics. when he complained about bitter voters, barack obama forgot that everyone's got a camera then there was that fatal mckawakami moment that ended a senator's career. the camera never blinks. how many political scouts are claimed by the relentless 24/7 news cycle? howard dean's scream, jeremiah wright's rants.

today an eternity. finally, bloggers rule. "newsweek" had the monica lewinsky's story, but it was a blogger, matt drudge, who broke it. gone are the days when the big boys who control newspapers control the political news. hi, i'm chris matthews. welcome to the show. today a look at how the new media universe has changed things in politics. let's look at some of the new rules politicians forget at their peril. for one, beware the cell phone camera politicians wept to school on this, from former virginia senator george allen, once a highly touted presidential candidate. et>> l's give a welcome to macaca here. welcome to america and the real world of virginia. >> boy, that killed his career. he said it was a nonsense word that came off as a racial slur. never again. >> well, this is the world he's in, we're all in now, where you have to be very careful. and i never quite knew what the word meant.

he never explained what it meant. but it went viral, and once it went viral, he was done. >> katty, this was a volunteer campaign and what looked to be a cell phone. he was looking at what he thought was a kid, a young guy, and he was giving him a little bit of trouble because he was bothering him and he was talking to a guy with a phone, he thought, but he was talking to a guy with a camera. >> when this goes viral, when it really has the most impact is when people start thinking, this is who the guy is. that's all you hear of george allen. you hear it again and again, and that becomes his persona. that becomes who jarge allen is, and then he becomes a racist. everything else that you know about him or what you might have seen about him in a more thoughtful broadcast gets obliterated by the fact that you are seeing this relentlessly on teonvisi. even if it's only a period of 24 days, because it gets replayed and replayed. ecit bomes that person. even if he didn't mean it as a racial slur, the word "macaca"

-- >> that's all you hear about. two years later british open and sarah palin both forgot the cell phone cameras everywhere when they dropped their guard in private fundraisers. what she wasn't counting on is what people in the non-patriotic parts of the country -- let's talk about barack obama. he's in a wealthy fund-raising group up in san francisco. it was a supporter, apparently, who had one of those phones. >> a supporter quasi-journalist, i might add -- and that's a whole other story -- who had one of those.

and clinggin to guns, that's been a rallying cry. something he ended up having to deal with and apologize for. and i think politicians now know you're always on the record, number one, and there is no off-broadway anymore. there's no time to rehearse on h-a presidential campaign. you're on all the time. so the time you spend in iowa getting the kinks out, forget it. chris: no more retail. you're talking to everybody when you're in a ram now. >> the dream of twitter, facebook, people being able to communicate through people's blackberries, the dream of that is it's more authentic and spontaneous. politicians can get around all of us, the reporters, and speak directly to the people. here's the reality. it's made politics less spontaneous, more controlled, because politicians know that at

any time the most kind of casual remark can become a huge story. so it's made our politics more artificial at a time when people say they want more spontaneity. chris: howard dean's scream the night of the iowa caucuses reverberated 633 times on tv in just four days. >> he suffered two setbacks in iowa, the first, his disappointing third-place finish the second, and far more damaging, was this -- we're going to california and texas and new york and south dakota and oregon and washington and michigan, and then we're going to washington, d.c. to take back the white house, yeah! >> people now have the sense of him being too negative and too angry. so finding his feet this week is going to be very difficult. chris: wow. he didn't know what a directed mic was, either. he thought he was yelling at the room. >> running for office now,

there's a deadline every nanosecond and you have to be on all the time. and you wonder, when does the candidate have any time to thino, tk get some perspective? i think it's ran into successful candidates being more programmed, more manipulated, if you will, by advisors than ever before. when you leave the house in the morning, listen, be careful every second of the day. these cameras -- there's phone cameras out there, people twittering. and you say, let's just walk around, thinking a little bit. don't think out loud. probably better not to think at all. >> an advisor to both campaigns would say at the end of the day a memo would go around to all the advisors, who won the 24-hour news cycle. the sense of having lost or won one 24-hour block, you can't take a long-term perspective. chris: the barack obama campaign said it was caught flat-footed when they found the d.v.d.'s of

the reverend jeremiah wright's sermons. his rants were played endlessly. here's pat buchanan talking about the impact. >> reverend wright's stuff and all these things on put him outside the center of american politics, he's got one foot in radicalism. the folks knew one thing, reverends wright was his pastor. he lost 41 points. chris: because of the way this got around, those rants, god damn america, those horrible things that were coming out of reverent wright, any right wing opponent could play that as a news item. >> that's what happened. not just on television, but on the web and on youtube. you may have an incident which is played 200 times on television it's then being played perhaps a million times on youtube and on the internet. and people are going to it partly out of entertainment. they're going partly to reinforce their own political views. but -- chris: especially when you have news networks with points of

view. they can say it's just news, but let's look at it again. >> that, plus the fact that rarely are these things put in context and reported with any perspective. it goes up on youtube, nobody says anything. nobody says what the context was. nobody says what the background was. and it goes viral and it's put out that way. so there's never a frame around it saying, well, this is how this happened, this is the background in which it happened, this is the background against his record. all that is out. >> but look at what barack obama did with reverends wright. in this day and age you can't wait for a story to gather steam, you have to deal with it. some said he wait add little long. but he ended up having to confront it directly, gave his speech on race, which lots of people think ended up becoming the high point of his campaign. so a good politician and a good fstaf has to understand, ok, this is something we cannot ignore. in the old days you could ignore -- >> let's take a look at the low point and the way things work.

sarah palin blew it in those katie couric interviews, but hard ball magnified the damage to palin. let's watch. >> what other supreme court decisions do you disagree with? >> well, let's see. >> what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were asked to do this? >> i read most of them, again, with great appreciation for the press and the media. >> which ones specifically? i'm curious. >> all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years. chris: she wasn't able to talk about any supreme court decision. not ablealo tk about what newspapers she reads. what question is an easy o for her? well, that was pretty rough going, but her answer was like a kid answering a book report question who didn't read the book. >> or the cliff notes, either one. and it was damaging to her, and i have two words -- tina fey.

not only was it the echo chamber, but also, there's the comedy shows, there's entertainment, which has become a very, very big part of this. chris: and that makes youtube. >> and that makes youtube. if anybody thinks you're being unfair to sarah palin, look at it on youtube. >> the only thing i could say about this is that the echo chamber is so constant, so non-stop, if you can hang on for a couple of news cycles, there will be some new storl. chris: but you still have a permanent record that can be drawn on. >> but look what happened to sarah palin. in that same incident had happened in 1975, it would have ended her career. but in this era, it didn't, because there's other media opportunities that will come up. chris: we have to talk about barack obama. his approval took a 2009 nosedive, do you recall this, in the summer of those health care town halls. >> you want to be led out of here? you're welcome to go. now, wait a minute, now, wait a

minute, now, wait a minute, now, wait a minute. wait, wait, wait a minute. >> do you all think that you're persuading people when you shout out like that? beg your pardon? chris: arlen specter, you saw him really trying to deal with it. everyone politician knows how dangerous those moments can be. >> it can get out of control. all those clips you showed seemingly the politicians are out of control. that's never a good thing. >> but then we have to draw a conclusion of, were all town hall meetings like this, or just the ones that came in the cable loop that were played over and over and oifer again? or did we create more town hall meetings by continuing to play those? >> part of the reason that it goes viral so quickly is not totally out of the blue. it's picking up on a public dissatisfaction anyway. so you have people replaying things because it reconfirms an original political premise. chris: another way politicians

have been hurt by new media, john kerry was high in the polls after the democratic convention in 2004, but not for long. those swift vote veterans sank him. they made a tiny advertisement in a small media market, a few of those markets, which were designed to get replayed on the internet and on the cable news universe. in the new language of the digital age, they wanted it to go viral, and it did. >> i served with john kerry. >> i served with john kerry. >> john kerry has not been honest about what happened in vietnam. he is lying about his record. chris: this was a tough negative ad put out there by kerry's enemies and it got out there like a news item almost, all over the place. >> this underscores something john mentioned before, and gloria did as well, and that is the emphasis is on responding quickly. you've got to respond quickly. if you recall, the kerry campaign and the candidate himself for whatever reason decided to ignore this for too

long a time, among other things, look, we have a whole campaign to won. it's like trying to change a fan belt from a moving mercedes. there's a lot going on. but they waited too long to respond to this and they allowed it to play out just as the perpetrators of this intended for it to play out. >> but that was in 2004 and it was at a time when the world was changing in terms of youtube and the web. i don't think the political campaigns were aware of the fact that people weren't getting their news anymore from watching the nightly news broadcasts. but because they came from a generation that got their news the old-fashioned way, they didn't believe it. people are increasingly getting all their news from youtube and clips sent to their cell phones. chris: using free media was not lost on sarah palin. she did serious damage to obama's health care campaign when she posted this on facebook, completely free of charge. this is her quote -- "the america i know and love is not which in which my parents or

baby with down's syndrome will have to stand in front of obama's death panel. such a system is downright evil." catty, unbelievable. >> unbelievable. and, again, it taps into a general american suspicion about the direction of the health care bill and the role of big government. and she used facebook, but she was expressing a public sentiment. >> and she hit a very quotable quote, the death penalty thing. that was not just something she dreamed up. this was something that was a strong quote, a quote that will bang in there rightwa ay. >> a new soapbox, an you're unquestioned, because if you tweet it or it's on your facebook -- chris: how does facebook pick up something like on a news program or anywhere else -- >> there it is. it appears. we have people who look at everybody's facebook page or follow people who tweet, and a politician now can say, well, we just passed this fabulous bill, isn't that great, or i just voted for this because i care

about you, and they don't have to have an interview with us. they can just tweet whatever they want. >> within seconds they can reach millions of people. chris: if you miss anything on cable, you go to somebody and say, i want to see it again. there it is on facebook. >> the common theme here, chris, is people who used to be the referee, the front-page editors at the washington "times" or "the washington post," they're out of touch. chris: it's completely democratic journalism, meaning anybody can do it. when we come back, how a blogger who works out of his house broke the monica lewinsky story. politicians have learned it's not just a few reporters they have to worry about, how modern media has changed politics it serve.

chris: welcome back. we're talking about how new media have changed politics. it used to be that a few reporters were all a national politician had to worry about, a turning point was in january of 1998. a little-known guy with his own internet gossip site, matt drudge, rocked washington. he broke a gossip item that "newsweek" had been sitting on. they hadn't published it yet. it was posted on the drudge report and here it was. the president of the united states is having an affair with monica lewinsky. it was three days later that "the washington post" finally decided to go with that story that "newsweek" editors had been vetting. another example like this -- it took a reporter for abc news internet political sheet called "the note" to report this. >> then strom thursday mon voted for president, we voted for him. we're proud of him. and if the rest of the country

would have followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all those problems over all these years. chris: john, it brought down a leder of the senate. >> absolutely. chris: a little item in a little tip sheet, "the note." >> that was a big generational moment that has changed journalism and politics over the past 15 years. it used to be that you could identify by name the important people who conoltrled the agenda. they were the editor of "the washington post," a handful of columnists, it was dan and his executive producer and his washington bureau chief. there were probably three dozen people. they were the filter. thnow ere are tens of millions of filters. everybody who has access to a mouse -- >> no more gatekeepers. >> very few. and this would be as good a place as any to say that this system, the new reality, is open to interpretation. it used to be in the old media world that a richard nixon operation or some democratic operation could say we're going

to turn our own banks loose on chris matthews. we get our phone banks and get get phone calls or we're going to write a lot of letters to the editor and get in the newspaper. the new democratic system can be manipulated by people who are cynical and say we're going to manipulate the system and get this started, and we'll force the bigger newspapers and cable outlets to pick up on the source. people need to be very aware of that. >> we've seen it in very real times. i think it's fabulous, the more information the better. the fact we are getting more information about parts of the world that never would have been done before is great. but you did see during the iranian revolution, after the elections, you had twitter things that came out that sounded like they were from people opposing the regime and actually they were from the regime. so there's a very good example of where you do not have an editor, you don't know exactly what you're getting. chris: when we come back, if what you're getting. chris: when we come back, if you're a p as governor, he balanced budgets without raising taxes. and california created 1.9 million jobs.

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chris: welcome back. we've been going through the huge pile of evidence that new media is a challenge to the average politician. but there's a shining example on the plus side. john mccain pioneered the use of the internet to raise money and to build support back in 2000. four years later howard dean came up from nowhere to create a viable campaign on the internet. remember "you have the power."

and then another four years later the obama campaign perfected organizing on the internet with 6.5 million raised and 3 million people recruited signed up with the campaign. the crucial fact -- the average online gift of obama's campaign was only $80, and the average donor gave again and again. gloria, that's how you build a team. >> it's a gold mine, and the obama campaign perfected it. we don't know what the next iteration of that will be. but it's very clear that if you want to keep your base in politics together and if you want to keep a young demographic on your side, one place to do it -- the republicans were light-years behind the democrats last time around. one place to do it is on the internet. and you'll notice now that when the president does his saturday morning address, it used to be just a radio address. now it's a video. chris: five years from now, will

politics running for president be tweeting all day? dan rather? >> no, whatever succeeds tweets they'll be doing. chris: is tweet over? has it tweeted? >> i think it will be all on cell phones, donations on cell phones and information on cell phones. >> i shink tomeone will continue to tweet for the candidate. >> mobile device revolution is just getting underway. [ male announcer ] the turn changes everything.

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chris: thanks to a great roundtable at this fascinating look of the modern media. dan rather, katty kay, gloria borger and john harris. that's the show. thanks for watching. see you here next week. captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- [ son ] my parents have always lived in the states. until two years ago, when my dad transferred to istanbul.

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