The Year of the YouTube Campaign Video (Forensic Version)

Many pundits and media commentators made a fuss in 2006, calling that election the YouTube election.  For years anyone with a video camera could capture pols in embarrassing moments, but if the video was never shared with others, or if the gatekeepers in television news didn't deem it "newsworthy," few would see it.  YouTube eliminated the monopoly of the gatekeepers, and both campaigns and those who wanted to take down a candidate seized the opportunities to disseminate video.  The archetypal example of the changes wrought by YouTube is the defeat of Virginia Senator George Allen due in part to his now-infamous Macaca moment.

We're currently in a very peculiar YouTube moment in the Democratic nomination contest.  Over the last week Hillary Clinton has been trying to slough off criticism that she had a Walter Mitty Moment, in which she claimed that in 1996 she once landed in Tuzla, Bosnia, under sniper fire and had to run to her vehicle to escape the flying bullets.  The truth, you probably now know, is that the Dayton accords had been signed the previous year, and that the Tuzla airport was safe enough that the President had visited it earlier in the year.  Not only didn't she have to run for her life, she in fact participated in a calm ceremony on the tarmac with many people, including the President of Bosnia, an 8 year old Bosnian girl, and her daughter Chelsea.  

What makes this a YouTube campaign moment isn't that someone caught Hillary Clinton in an unguarded or reckless moment and posted the video on YouTube for all to see.  No, what makes this a YouTube campaign moment is that the video from 12 years ago has ended up on YouTube to show that Clinton is completely wrong in almost every one of her assertions about that visit to Tuzla.  

As Keith Olberman explained, just about every detail Clinton gave was false, she's told the false story multiple times, she and her campaign refused for several days to admit she was wrong, and even now her mea culpa is hedged, not particularly forthcoming and is still less than candid in admitting that what she said was false:

"Now let me tell you what I can remember, OK -- because what I was told was that we had to land a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire. So I misspoke -- I didn't say that in my book or other times but if I said something that made it seem as though there was actual fire -- that's not what I was told. I was told we had to land a certain way, we had to have our bulletproof stuff on because of the threat of sniper fire. I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this 8-year-old girl and, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her -- so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left, Now that's my memory of it.

"Let me tell you what I can remember."  Here's the YouTube moment: what she now claims she was told or what she can or can't remember is less significant than what can easily be found on YouTube, namely, a whole slew of contemporaneous television news reports that clearly contradict her earlier claims that she was subjected to sniper fire:

It's been available on YouTube for days, and has now been supplemented with several other reports showing the same events from slightly different camera angles.  And it hardly takes the kind of maniacal focus on details that obsessives have lavished on the Zapruder film to see that everything was calm, that she strolled out of the plane toward the ceremony, and that there was no imminent threat to her life or the lives of anyone else on that tarmac.

Unlike the Macaca moment, this wasn't a new piece of video.  It wasn't a revelation, something previously unknown and exposed to the world.  This time, the problem for the candidate isn't something she just said that ended up on YouTube, it's that what she said is easily refuted by watching video available for everyone to see on YouTube.    

In the past, a campaign might have hoped that something like this would go away, that the traditional media, especially television news, would not run the old video.  But the old video got out, via YouTube, and people have been looking at it for days...except, apparently, Hillary Clinton, who is still talking about what she was told, which doesn't hold up to what we, thanks to YouTube, can see with our own eyes.  

[h/t to JedReport and jthomascronin]