Author Christopher Hitchens, Co-Creator and Former Head Writer of Comedy Central's The Daily Show Lizz Winstead, Barely Political creator Ben Relles, CitizenSugar Editor Zoe Stagg and Web Editor at The Onion Baratunde Thurston discuss new technology used in political campaigns.
Panelists talked about why the 2008 election has become a "pop culture phenomenom."
Topics included why satirical Daily Show-type shows and Web sites have become politically influential, using celebrities to pull voters into political discussion, and if bloggers should identify themselves as journalists.
After the discussion, panel members responded to audience members' questions. Tammy Haddad moderated.
Pop Culture Politics is part of the forum 2008: The First 21st Century Campaign, which was held in the Washington, D.C., offices of Google.
It is co-sponsored by YouTube and National Journal.
Bio
Tammy Haddad
Tammy Haddad is a veteran executive producer of network news and entertainment programs. Best known as the creator and longtime executive producer of “Larry King Live,” she brought Larry King to television in 1985.
By the early nineties, the show became the most watched and most talked about talk show in the history of cable television.
During the 1992 election, the show became the first stop for any presidential candidate trying to reach directly over the heads of the Washington press corps to talk to the citizenry.
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens is an author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2008.
Ben Relles
Ben
is Head of Creative Development at the YouTube Next Lab. In this role
he works with some of the most innovative producers in online video to
help them build their audience and develop their content and creative
programming. Prior to joining YouTube, Ben was Vice President of
Programming at online video leader Next New Networks where he led content strategy as the company built viewership to over two billion total views.
Ben also founded and runs the comedy network Barely Political which
has been viewed over one billion times since launching in 2007 and is
one of YouTube's top 10 most viewed channels of all time. Ben started Barely Political with his series of "Obama Girl" videos which quickly became a worldwide phenomenon and eventually was named by Newsweek as one of the top five memes of the decade. The Barely Political network continued to expand when Ben created a partnership with the Gregory Brothers to launch their Autotune the News series on the network. Ben also co-created the show The Key of Awesome which is currently one of the internet's most popular shows, with over 30 million views per month.
Zoe Stagg
Zoë Stagg is a writer who splits her time between San Francisco and New York City. With a Master’s in speech communication, her work has been featured, or is forthcoming, in Ready Made, San Francisco Magazine, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Sunset, Co-ed, Veg news, Relate, New York Moves, and Roam.
Baratunde Thurston
Baratunde Thurston is a comedian, author and vigilante pundit. He was nominated for the Bill Hicks Award for Thought Provoking Comedy, declared a Champion of the First Amendment by Iowa State, and called "someone I need to know" by Barack Obama. He has appeared on ABC, NPR, the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and ComedyCentral.com.
Thurston is the co-founder of Jack & Jill Politics and performs regularly in New York City, where he works by day as Web Editor and politics czar for The Onion. He hosts Popular Science's "Future Of" on the Science Channel, and he lives in Twitter.
Lizz Winstead
Lizz Winstead is a Minnesota-born comedian who was co-creator of The Daily Show along with Madeline Smithberg, and served as head writer.
Interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture. Originally identified with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (founded 1964) and with such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, today cultural studies is recognized as a discipline or area of concentration in many academic institutions and has had broad influence in sociology, anthropology, historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, and art criticism. Among its central concerns are the place of race (or ethnicity), class, and gender in the production of cultural knowledge.
member. 
