Presidential Speeches Forever Changed
Thursday, January 28, 2010
President Obama gave his State of the Union address, yesterday evening. By early this morning, several journalist and news sites had done some pretty creative things with the address that have never been done before.
PBS NewsHour had broken the speech down into segmented clips that focused on and provided links for specific topics. The New York Times combined the speech with reactions and comments from Twitter and Facebook. NPR and The St. Petersburg (FL) Times focused on the most important topics and did a little bit of fact checking.
This is a big deal. Not only is the media covering the most important presidential speech of the year, they are contributing to it. The media brought together people from across the nation with same opinions. The media gave people more resources that enable them to understand the address topic-by-topic. Finally, the media checked the accuracy of the speech.
No longer do people have to give blind faith to what the president says because he is the president. No longer is the discussion of what the president spoke about a friend-to-friend, neighbor-to-neighbor, coworker-to-coworker discussion but a national one. Now, everyone can participate and are not left in the dark, because they did not understand what the president was talking about.
This will change presidential speeches for the better, because now the people can really get into it, understand the issues, and be involved.
