Ari Melber from The Nation wrote a very interesting post over at Personal Democracy Forum about Condoleezza Rice’s recent confrontation with several students at Stanford.  If you haven’t seen Rice’s defensive scolding of these students yet, here it is, video courtesy of Stanford student Reyna Garcia:

I won’t go too far into analyzing Rice’s remarks.  Whether or not this was a “Frost/Nixon moment,” it was very revealing.  For a good account of how disturbing Rice’s comments are, see this piece by Scott Horton, which Melber links to in his post.  What I want to focus on is just how effective these students were at provoking Rice to get off message.  There’s a powerful lesson here for journalists–professional and citizen alike.

Ari Melber is a journalist and blogger who understands the changing dynamics of his business and the power of the internet.  I’ve interacted with him several times on Twitter, and I’ve been impressed at how he engages with the progressive social media community.  Like Ana Marie Cox, he uses the internet as a feedback loop between the world of professional journalists and the world of bloggers, twitterers, and citizen journalists.

In any case, Melber’s post at PDF gets at something very important in the Rice moment at Stanford:

The seven-minute clip quickly drew 150,000 views, shot up to the top of Rice videos on YouTube, and jumpstarted traditional media coverage. Blogs pounced. Law professor Jack Balkin, who runs an influential legal blog, banged out a quick analysis of the claim that an act isn’t torture if “Bush ordered it.” The Washington Post ran an item about how the “riled” former secretary of state was “caught on tape” giving a “finger-wagging” torture defense to students. Online radio host Cenk Uyger picked up the clip with a YouTube commentary, “Condi Rice Pulls a Nixon,” that drew over 100,000 views. The next day, Keith Olbermann devoted a segment to broadcasting and discussing Garcia’s video on MSNBC.

Melber accurately draws a direct line from George Allen’s “macaca” scandal a few years ago to the latest furor over Rice’s comments.  (Incidentally, I’m proud to say that S.R. Sidarth was a student of mine when I was a TA at the University of Virginia–the course was “Democracy”.)  I’m convinced that this kind of journalism will and should increase rapidly in the near future.  S.R. Sidarth’s videotaping of George Allen calling him “macaca” was the “aha” moment when we realized the power of citizen journalism to get at the truth behind the layers of facade that politicians frequently hide behind.  Reyna Garcia’s video of Condoleezza Rice has taken citizen journalism a step further by possibly catching a former high level administration official revealing complicity in a crime.

Why is citizen journalism like this so powerful?  I think one answer is that citizen journalists don’t have to worry about their future careers as journalists nearly as much as the professional journalists do.  In other words, professional journalists frequently have to worry about access.  They don’t want to anger public officials and powerful people too much by being too aggressive, because they know that if they cross certain lines these people will stop talking to them.  For instance, I saw Andrea Mitchell on “Hardball” the other night, and she was making a very implausible argument that Rice’s statement was not a “Frost/Nixon” moment.  It seemed pretty clear to me that Mitchell was trying to stay on Rice’s good side.  But citizen journalists don’t have this problem because we’re not worried about future access.  We have the opportunity to be as aggressive as we want.  After all, there probably isn’t going to be any possibility of future access anyway.

I say “we” tentatively because I’ve dabbled in citizen journalism (see my take on the tea party protest and this hearing with Eric Holder).  I haven’t yet had the chance to interview powerful people.  Yet, I think the model that Melber has presented of the feedback between bloggers, citizen journalists, and the major media outlets is instructive.  The lesson I’ve learned from Reyna Garcia’s video and Melber’s post is that if I ever have the opportunity to interview political elites for this blog, I’m going to try to ask questions that the mainstream media is freqently too deferential to ask.  And I’m going to bring a video camera.