TSA #OptOut Post-Mortem: Why Did the Media Overblow the Story?

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post here looking at the sudden flowering of online protest against the Transportation Safety Administration's new "enhanced" pat-down searches, and asked whether it was possible that real on-the-ground civil disobedience was about to break out at airport security lines. I also answered my question with the obvious prediction that it wasn't:

It would appear that the moment is ripe for public dismay to turn into collective action. But can a very loose knit network of websites coalesce into effective action without clear leadership? A few of the new sites have names attached to them, but not all do. And joining a Facebook group in support of the November 24 "opt-out" or "do not fly" day hardly seems likely to lead to action that day (which is also the most traveled day of the year, just prior to Thankgiving)....

While there may be a few gutsy individuals who will try to gum up the works on November 24th, this is a pretty high bar to expect people to climb over on their own. Anti-TSA activists are going to have to come up with a more effective strategy than the one they're on now if they think the internet is going to solve this problem for them.

But despite all the obvious reasons why the November 24th "Opt Out Day" was doomed to fizzle, the American media went nuts over the story. As media critic David Carr points out in the New York Times today, "If a squadron of mad scientists surrounded by supercomputers gathered in a laboratory to try to conjure a single news topic that would blow up large, they could not touch the T.S.A. pat-down story." Indeed, in some airports, there were apparently more reporters on hand than protesters.

Why did the press misjudge this story so badly? I think there are two reasons. First, as I noted in an interview with NPR's "On the Media," the TSA pat-down story is pure catnip for cable news: where else do you get to talk about terrorism and sex at the same time, while flashing pictures of naked people on the screen?

But more seriously, this is yet another example of how much of our media keeps failing to understand the role of the internet in politics these days--and hyperventilating when some quiet reflection is in order. Just because people are chattering on Twitter, signing online petitions, forming and joining Facebook groups, and building virtual connections around viral videos (like John Tyner's "You Touch My Junk, I'll Have You Arrested" classic, which is now at nearly one million views), doesn't mean they have built the requisite social capital to risk arrest, civil fines and/or disruption of their personal lives.

That could yet happen, and if it does we should certainly note that the internet laid the groundwork. But converting shared ideas into shared action is still hard. (It's worth noting that the only collective protest of the invasive searches that I know of was organized by a political party--the Pirate Party of Germany--which got a group of activists to shed down to their skivvies at the airport in Berlin recently.)

Unfortunately, there is almost no serious coverage of organizing in the media today, and that is doubly true for net-powered organizing. Whether it's MoveOn or the Tea Party, Wikileaks or Wikipedia, the press treats all of these as phenomena that just "happen," and only rarely tries to dig into the details of how they are put together. The result is a kind of self-reinforcing ignorance, and a constant falling for the next bright and shiny thing online.

P.S. One small piece of the story that I got wrong while on NPR. The TSA blog did not shut down comments last week; as "Blogger Bob" explains here, the flood of comments created a backlog that slowed down comment moderation. A virtual gumming up of the works, if you will.