Over the past month or so, announcements from presidential hopefuls have been delivered via webcasts posted on Youtube and other video-sharing sites (you can view them here). And it’s just the beginning of a new overall approach. Candidates are promising to engage directly with voters via new media, creating webcasts, blogs, and online chat. When you consider the latest in mainstream media coverage, it’s easy to see why candidates would be doing everything possible to access voters directly.

A New York Times story reports that over the past few days Fox News has repeatedly cited an Insight magazine report that Barack Obama, who spent a few years in Jakarta as a boy, attended a school that teaches a radical version of the Muslim faith.

It gets better. The report is attributed to “researchers connected to” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Howard Wolfson, told the New York Times:
“This is a textbook example of how the other side works. A right-wing rag makes up a scurrilous charge and prints it with no real attribution. The smear gets injected into the atmosphere and picked up by talk radio. In this case both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton were victimized.”

CNN then sent a correspondent to Jakarta who pronounced the school unaffiliated with Islamic fundamentalism. Then, after the segment debunking the story aired, CNN anchors Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper took the opportunity to celebrate their network. Blitzer: “CNN did what any serious news organization is supposed to do in this kind of a situation.”

Let’s hope those webforums take off because when celebrity journalists such as Blitzer and Cooper have become the champions of hard-hitting journalism, you know it’s going to be a long and depressing campaign season in mainstream medialand.

Tags: bill clinton, islam, wolf blitzer