Karl Rove Signs Up For Twitter, Tells GOP To “Master New Media” About Six Months Too Late

As Bush says a final goodbye to Air Force One, his senior adviser Karl Rove has jumped aboard the Twitter train to New Media Town. He’s using the status-update site to promote his media appearances and share some of Bush’s wisdom about their intertwined legacy: “History will get it right and we’ll both be dead!”

Twitter is one place that we may witness the public effort for a resurgence of the Republican grassroots movements, as they engage with the next generation of voters. Signing up in the week before Obama’s inauguration, Karl Rove has made a highly symbolic move as he wonders how anyone can steer the Republican Party out the wilderness. The irony is not lost that Rove has moved toward an open, inclusive and fairly liberal network at a time when Obama declares “I will open the doors of Government and ask you to be involved in your own Democracy again.” Rove must be desperate. Directing the Right’s bow towards blogs and social media has stumbled in the past, though Twitter continues to be an indispensable asset for political communication.

Rove’s final tip in his Op-ed “A Way Out of the Wilderness” declares “The GOP must master new media.” With all of Rove’s Twitter-talk about ninjas, he must feel the need to become a sensei of New Media, declaring “Democrats have successfully developed tools to exploit online advocacy, and Republicans must spend more time and energy doing the same.” The strategy is not lost on this Twitter commenter: “He’s obviously trying to build a new career in now a Democrat dominant political env. He’s vsmart…like a weasel.”

With Twitter displacing the mainsteam-media as the first place to break news stories, the BBC have been caught out using it to source information about Mumbai, inaccurately. Similarly, as journalists met in a five-star hotel in Athens for the Global Forum for Media Development, outside the rioting was happening, and being broadcast on Twitter and Facebook. A journalist who was present at the forum declared: “It is a dangerous world, indeed, when citizen reporters are completely trusted, both by the media institutions that incorporate them and by the audience who consume that information.”

Posted by Mike Smith in Creative Economy | January 13, 2009 2:58PM |