With the 2012 presidential election season tumultuously underway, the USC Annenberg School’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy (CCLP) in coordination with the USC’s Bedrosian Center and the USC Unruh Institute of Politics continues their successful Road to the White House forum promoting political discourse between leading academics and the community to help inform and shape political policies.
The first CCLP-hosted forum of the new semester kicked off on Wednesday January 25, 2012, to a successful reception spotlighting U.S foreign policy relations in the Middle East and North Africa and the effect of new media technologies shaping political discourse in U.S foreign policy.
The panel discussion was led by CCLP faculty fellow Gordon Stables, USC’s director of Debate and Forensics; and Shawn Powers, Ph.D., Georgia State University communication professor and an expert on emerging media in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Members of the Trojan Debate Squad Katrina Kaiser, Nate Wong, and Chris Patterson were also present on the panel to discuss the research findings and conclusions involving the Arab Spring.
The panelists raised informative discourse and questions about the way U.S. citizens choose to actively engage and inform U.S. foreign political policy focusing on Middle East foreign policy and the Arab Spring movement. With the revolution of the Arab Spring, citizens once censored and cut off by their government, actively demonstrated on the scene reporting of atrocities as they were happening. With this new found active citizen voice, governments have trouble keeping tabs on and regulating their peoples finding themselves at the will of technology gate keepers.
Panelists demonstrated those actively engaged in politics must outline the current election year within a new media worldwide perspective. Political discourse is now being shaped up to the minute, one can say, at the will of a 140 character tweet. Within this new political domain, user interfaces of new media technologies outpace traditional news media outlets. Governments and Citizens must re-evaluate how to shape and interact within this new political geography in order to shape a more cohesive union.
In this election year it is with utmost relevance to consider how political agendas correlate with traditional broadcast feeds and their incorporation of new media platforms such as, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Active participants in the new media landscape need to evaluate the freedoms represented by these new media platforms and how they are attempting to be regulated and controlled by their respective governments.
It is essential to understand how news content can be geopolitically motivated by media news correspondents representing different agendas. For example, Powers presented a video showing U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton giving a surprisingly honest assessment of the poor state of the broadcast news industry in America. Clinton stated, “viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because its real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.”
Politics reshapes and defines itself based on the entertainment medium revolutionizing the age. We saw it first with the televised debates of the 1960’s with Kennedy and Nixon re-inventing how to win elections based on overall charisma. Obama actively uses the medium of the age to his advantage forming town halls on Twitter and Facebook. Elections are shaped by the media outlet that defines the age.
Following the riveting discussion, panelists engaged in a Q&A session bringing to the forefront current congressional bills SOPA and PIPA recently overridden by public outcry and online protests. If you would like to attend future Road to the White House Events please find a list of future dates here.
This blog was written by CCLP IT Intern Sarah Ledesma.