“When I think about this campaign, it’s very much the same effect, in the sense that the general advertising going on—and there’s millions of dollars being spent on it—has, I would argue, a limited impact. The greater impact is driving the overall narrative and driving the press coverage of the campaign, which most of the time is what it’s really designed to do. And the example I would cite that’s has had the greatest impact, in terms of the McCain general election campaign was the Celebrity ad, the Paris Hilton ad. They got more hits on that on your tube than anything of the entire campaign. And it got enormous attention, and that’s what it was designed to do… to impact and feed the exact sort of audience you were talking about.”

The panel spoke about how blogs can put or force items on to the mainstream news agenda that might have once have been ignored, or taken longer to come up. The week’s case in point: Bristol Palin’s pregnancy.

Easton set the back story: “DailyKos ran a long thing questioning whether Sarah Palin’s Downs Syndrome child was actually hers, or whether it was her daughters. It shows photos of Governor Palin, supposedly pregnant at seven months, and she doesn’t look pregnant at all. And it recounts how she got on an airplane after her water broke, for an eight hour flight, and reasonably questioned why any woman really pregnant and in labor would actually get on an eight hour flight. It was a very, long, long, long piece with a lot of stuff in it.”

“To pull back the curtain a little bit further, I don’t know a reporter who did not get that emailed to them. And I don’t know a reporter who off the record would not have said, ‘Oh, there like there’s actually some compelling stuff in here, if you look at the photos.’ And then there were reporters, and we were among them, that started asking questions of the campaign that they felt like they had to get this out,” replied VandeHei.

Cowan pointed out that the Kos post—which the panel named as the ur-source for Monday’s spotlight stealing revelation that Palin’s daughter was, in fact, currently pregnant—was fully pseudonymous. And Simon pointed out that its central premise was inaccurate, even though it smoked out the other pregnancy, the true story.

Eight years ago, how would the Palin pregnancy (as trivial and invasive as it may have been) have come to light? Would it have? The panel didn’t explore that question. As things wrapped up, McKinnon was already scrolling through his iPhone. Who knows how many unread emails, Twitters, and Drudge-alerts had come and gone while the panel chatted?

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