Thursday, January 25, 2007

Does Romney Still Praise the New Media?

An interesting juxtaposition, in light of Romney's little altercation with MassResistance:

In December 2006, Mitt Romney told Kathryn Lopez of National Review that he gets nearly all of his news online now. Romney said:

"No longer can just a few newspapers or television stations control what information we have access to. The monopoly on news has been broken wide open. I trust the people and the power of ideas to triumph in the free and competitive information market that the new media provides."

On January 22, the Boston Globe published a story about an activist who successfully leveraged the new media to "rain on Romney's parade" [that would be Brian Camenker, head of MassResistance]:

The burst of attention has catapulted Camenker, a political agitator who has long protested gay rights in Massachusetts, into unlikely prominence in the nascent Republican presidential race. It has also underscored the startling power of the Internet to upset established political campaigns.

Some conservatives say Camenker's report, spiked with references to gay sex, has seriously damaged Romney's effort to woo conservative voters. Others dismiss the report as a joke. But Romney is not laughing.

Camenker said he called a few prominent conservatives ... to alert them to the report. But he has mostly e-mailed it to bloggers and activists, and let it spread on its own.... Camenker said, "All we're doing is spreading the truth."

"My goal is that the next president of the United States be a conservative," he said. Romney doesn't pass the test, he said. In a reference to the liberal gay state senator from Cambridge, Camenker said: "How's [Romney] going to stand up to the president of Iran if Jarrett Barrios scares him?"