It’s interesting to watch as nothing turns into a news story. Here’s the roundup of one such process from this week.
Holly Richardson writes about Tim Bridgewater’s momentum. When she talks about his fund raising she doesn’t mention that over 80% of it was a loan to himself. Tim likes the coverage (naturally) and the next day he posts her article on his RedState diary. Tim gave all the proper attribution and everything – I’m not trying to accuse him of plagiarism. The day after that Thomas Burr writes that “Holly Richardson is boosting Tim Bridgewater’s campaign” over at RedState. Whether it was an oversight or a calculated move is open for speculation, but the fact is that Holly didn’t promote Tim over at RedState – unless she did so under Tim’s name. Finally, Tim gets to tweet about the article by Thomas Burr which declares how beneficial Holly’s support is.
So with a couple of nudges from Tim this little game of Chinese whispers has produced, with a little invented fact here (Holly promoting Tim on RedState) and a little omitted fact there (Tim providing almost all his own campaign funding), almost a week’s worth of positive coverage.
The point here is not to accuse Tim of anything untoward – it is to illustrate the cycle of coverage growing in a vacuum. Tim did nothing this week (at least nothing to garner more coverage in those articles) and yet he got a four days of positive news from a topic (fund raising numbers) that seemed to have died before Holly’s post.
Originally published at Pursuit of Liberty.
I would put this more as “evolving media.”
You can’t begrudge Tim for creatively playing the game, taking advantage of the many ways that exist now for a candidate and his/her supporters to get their message/name injected in the new cycle. That’s what makes it so much more exciting than the 1970′s “Boys on the bus” era.
Mike Lee will only get so far shouting “Constitution!” at people, and Eager will only get so far acting like the entitled “Sarah Palin de Utah.” And Bennett doesn’t even seem to realize the internet exists.
I say kudos to any candidate or supporters of said candidate that have learned the new media processes well enough to use them to their advantage as Bridgewater just did.
Like I said, I was not accusing Tim of doing anything wrong. I was just noticing the pattern where news articles build on each other and turn a non-story into the subject du jour.