There has been a lot of giddiness and hoopla surrounding the use of Twitter by journalists to cover the leadership ructions in the Liberal Party this past fortnight. It certainly made for high-energy reading – with its rawness and immediacy, it made the readers feel as if they were there as journalists passed on factoids from the mayhem and provided links to news and analysis of running events.
The downside of course was that it also gave tweeting journalists the ability to be 100 per cent wrong in real time – and I include myself among their number – where rumour and conjecture was shot into cyberspace, sending frantic packs of gallery journalists sprinting down corridors searching for a reputed Julie Bishop press conference, to find nothing but a Coke machine.
This real-time dissemination of both fact and fiction is an issue for the political parties head of next year’s election, where any degree of tail-chasing undermines their desire for a stage-managed and risk-averse passage through the campaign.
But tweets come and go. The bigger danger for the parties is the rise of influential independent bloggers, and the explosion of chat rooms on issue-based blog sites, which often don’t even come to the attention of political staffers and party apparatchiks who are responsible for identifying and managing negative information.
This has the potential to become a nightmare for the Liberal Party under the new leadership of Tony Abbott.
The reason is that cyberspace skews young, it skews left- liberal, and also skews much more female than traditional media.
Admittedly, there are a lot of mad conservatives thrashing around on the net, running blog sites arguing that climate change is not only a post-communist conspiracy but a sign of the coming apocalypse.
But as a general rule the trend heads much more to the left of the spectrum. The last two election campaigns in the United States and Australia told the story – as Joe Trippi chronicles in his fascinating book The Revolution Will Not be Televised, Barack Obama was totally at home communicating (and, crucially, fundraising) in cyberspace, wheras John McCain looked like he’d be flat out using a Commodore 64.
Here, Kevin07 became the darling of the net community. When John Howard was cajoled by his advisors into making key announcements on climate policy via YouTube, it looked more like al-Jazeera hostage video. The old bloke was so clearly uncomfortable you expected two masked men to enter stage left and execute him.
Less than 24 hours into his life as Opposition Leader and Tony Abbott has already endured his first high-voltage pizzling in cyberspace. I reckon his staff would have been too busy reading the papers and following the radio and TV reports to realise it even happened.
The piece came courtesy of independent blogger and Fairfax columnist Mia Freedman, who is not an ideologue, but a smart, modern, inner-city feminist chick who juggles motherhood and marriage with an extraordinarily prolific writing career. She runs the juggernaut blogsite www.mamamia.com.au and at last count had a whopping 13,662 followers on Twitter, easily the biggest following of any Australian journo.
And on the morning after Tony Abbott became leader she tipped the following bucket on him, setting the tone with the provocative headline: “Tony Abbott is the new liberal leader. A very bad day for women. A great day for Joe Hockey’s family.”
The piece read:
“I am still trying to wrap my head around the fact that the liberal party has just elected a leader who is anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-IVF, anti stem cell research and who wants to ban no-fault divorce. What a great day for women! PS: Libs - are you on crack?”
With Tony Abbott installed as leader of the opposition (my fingers are struggling with typing that HOW CAN IT BE TRUE???) at least Joe Hockey will have the chance to be around while his kids are so little.
He has also been quoted as saying “climate change is crap”.
Super!
What do you think about the whole mess? Tony? Malcolm? Joe? ETS? Argh???!!!”
Freedman’s piece was a deadly accurate reflection of the views of her audience. And her readers needed no encouragement to hop in. The following comment was in keeping with most of the 300-odd which had been posted by Wednesday night:
“Let me see ... my ‘husband’ and I live in sin, we have had two children out of wedlock, I have had an abortion, I support the ETS bill, I have an IUD .... I’m bracing for women like me to be burned at the stake by The Mad Monk and his cronies.”
Freedman corrected one element of her intro – the contraception reference, after it was pointed out that Abbott is on the record as saying contraception is vastly preferable to abortion. In keeping with what is internet style, she ran a strikethrough line on the contraception reference to show she had amended the post after its publication.
Even with that qualifier it was a devastating character assessment for Tony Abbott. It’s obviously the kind of thing he will expect; given his rambunctious personality it’s the kind of thing he almost seems to invite, as he was always been one to speak his mind and front up for an argument.
The problem which he has is that these arguments are happening in a place where most conservatives fear to tread, or wouldn’t know where to tread. And the internet operates like Amway. It’s the greatest bit of pyramid marketing going around. I do not know what traffic Freedman did on this piece, but if half her twitter follows read and liked it, and forwarded it to two, three, four friends, the numbers would be staggering. Up there with daily newspaper circulation.
The greatest uncontrollable is when links to these types of stories get into chatrooms, and hundreds of people talk around them. The purpose of the chatroom has no bearing on the nature of the discussion either. Back in 2005, one of the most illustrative moments in terms of gauging the (initial) public outrage over Schapelle Corby’s jailing came to me via Daily Telegraph health reporter Sue Dunlevy, who forwarded a link to a chat room for nursing mothers to talk about mastitis, feeding techniques and so on. Several thousand women, who had nothing in common other than they were all nursing mums, used the chatroom to express their disgust at Corby’s treatment, their anger at the fact that Australia had given so much aid to Indonesia after the tsunami – it was an incredible explosion of rage, more illuminating than the letters pages or talkback.
As a social conservative who has had some high-profile dust-ups with smart Labor women such as Julia Gillard and Nicola Roxon, the internet has the potential to be hell for Tony Abbott.
By way of a postscript, the new Opposition Leader signed up to Twitter on Tuesday, and in the short time since his name has been linked to twitter reader lists with catchy titles such as peopleilovetohate, moneygrabbingarseholes, scum, haters, twats and ihategaypolarbears. Welcome to cyberspace, Tones.
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