In Cyberspace, No One Can Hear You Scream

The first full day of Netroots Nation kicked off this morning with a full slate of 9am panels. Newsdesk ducked into "Breakfast with Alex Gibney," where the Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Dark Side, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room screened a rough-cut segment from his newest project, Casino Jack: United States of Money. Following the rise, fall, and deep Republican connections of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the all-too-brief segment chronicled Abramoff's early college Republican days with Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. (As you'd expect, it was alternately hilarious and terrifying.) Due in theaters next year, said Gibney, it's "a cautionary tales about how money properly applied can create tremendous damage."

Occurring at the same time was "From Dean to Obama: Four Years in the Internet Revolution" with online gurus Joe Trippi, Karl Frish and others. Tension between new media and inane, 24-hour news coverage was a tenet of Trippi's take. In elections past, "TV was, if you can fake it and have enough money to fake it, you can make it." However, with new media – unfettered YouTube footage and the like – "authenticity matters. You cannot fake it for 24 hours anymore." Look no further than George Allen's macaca moment.

Still, Trippi says the authentic message of a campaign, dispersed online, can still be manipulated by the sound-bite media. "In a way, that's what happened to Howard (Dean)," said Trippi, his former campaign manager, of the infamous "Dean Scream" the media torpedoed his candidacy with. "We are at a dangerous moment … we still have this fake medium … that can take a six second sound bite and make it last forever."