If an infinite number of nerds had an infinite number of keyboards …

… they still wouldn’t have an impact on a general election
What difference do newspapers make to British elections? Does it matter that Rupert told The Sun which way to jump over their endorsement of Labour for instance? Which is another way of wondering, is it really the nuanced editorial ‘opinion’ of that paper that influences, if it does at all, the political allegiance of its readers? Or is the crucial thing, as far as red top tabloids are concerned, the tone in which they go about reporting the parties? In which, clearly the key thing about, for instance, The Sun’s somewhat Spartan coverage of politics in the last parliament has been the absence of ordure they’ve heaped on the official opposition. Certainly Michael Howard was not consistently treated to the same sort of rank abuse Neil Kinnock suffered from. So if tabloids can help frame their readers’ opinions (and it beggars belief to suppose they play absolutely no part), the damage is done through consistency and repetition, and none of these have applied to the Tories from Britain’s largest selling, and arguably worst newspaper. Whether through the caprice of its proprietor, or his desire to see the government sweat, or perhaps because of the entreaties of Guy Black, or still more plausibly, Rupert Murdoch’s growing disinterest in, and isolation from coverage of British domestic politics, The Sun can surely be seen to have made precious little difference to this campaign. Whatever will be seen to have won it this time, it won’t have been them. If old media isn’t packing the popular punch it once did, have new media stepped into the breach? No, and it’s an embarrassment to even suppose it comes close.

Part of the reason why some people are keen to believe that the internet might well play a role in British politics is simple cultural cringe towards the United States’ experience. There, whether through the ‘exposure’ of Dan Rather’s mendacity, or through genuine grass roots campaigning such as moveon.org, or even because of effective web-based political coverage — National Review Online being a prime example — it’s tempting to see a precedent, and to wonder when we might follow it. But even in each of these instances, the exemplary case is a lot weaker than it at first seems. Take NRO: without doubt Britain lacks anything which compares to it, but then it also lacks anything that compares to National Review, the print magazine. The Spectator, for instance, can’t be compared to NR simply because whilst the British magazine’s scope is signally broader, its depth is markedly more shallow. The Spectator’s newsstand success depends on its being a lifestyle magazine (as much as anything else, on taking it being the outward sign of that lifestyle) rather more than it does on either a heavy political content or it’s editorial line having a doctrinaire ideological posture. Yet the thing to remember here is still that it takes an established business model (never mind that neither NR nor, until very recently, The Spectator are notable examples of free market profitability) to be the parent of an effective online presence. No NR would have meant no NRO. And The Spectator’s (and while we’re at it, The New Statesman’s) pitiful online coverage of the election shows that even a print brand and serious corporate £££ doesn’t necessarily give us a decent web-based product.

Moveon.org, meanwhile, has some of the elements of the internet actually being a useful and instrumental tool for political activism, but here again the simple point has to be made — this faction in Democrat politics has been disastrous for the parent body. So while the internet clearly has facilitated its rise, that can’t really be marked down as an example of effective politics, given how toxically unpopular the ideas being transmitted have proven to be. Lastly, there’s Dan Rather, and a handful of other steadily less interesting examples of what the more excitable cousins see as Big Media, or the Liberal Press Establishment, or, Whatever Series of Frightening Capitalised sub-Marxian Words you prefer, getting its comeuppance. The idea being that, here were stories which were broken by the brave tyros of the world wide web, where the errors/lies/deceits/falsehoods/mistakes/run of the mill knockabout commentary (sorry, bit of old world scepticism leaking in there), would otherwise, but for these courageous bloggers, never have seen the light of day thanks to predominantly left wing, self-censoring journalists. It’s a comforting story, but its biggest defect is, what constituted lift-off for these stories once they finally ‘broke’? In other words, what had to break? That, of course, was penetration into exactly the mainstream media habitually denounced either for its bias or its coming redundancy.

From a British perspective, the American, non-profit making self-epublishing cottage industry (which essentially is all that blogging amounts to) does seem like so much hot air. It's incapable of having any autonomous political impact i.e. it fundamentally has to rely upon getting some purchase on the hated established media narrative in order to be of any significance. What, however, seems strangest of all, is the obsession with exposing ‘bias’. Why anyone is surprised by bias is entirely beyond me. Fair enough, many of the people involved in print and broadcast American journalism appear to be at least as self-deluding as most BBC types about their own level of political engagement, but what does it matter? Their bias is endemic, but what’s actually illegitimate about them being biased? That the BBC is biased in favour of etatisme can be disagreeable and tedious and unreflective, but, can it really be cause for too anguished comment that a state broadcaster broadcasts what’s at root a pro-state message? For conservative British critics of the BBC, this amounts to the dilemma evident in dislike of, oh, most everything that gets editorialised on the evening news, whilst at the same time wrestling with appreciation of coverage of Trooping the Colour.

As far as interaction with British politics is concerned, the internet still remains principally connected through being a tool for especially lazy hacks. Stories can be easily enough generated through it. For the parties, it remains a media not notably more interesting or effective than billboards. The weather has never been made by the internet. No surge in grass roots political activity has been channelled to the surface by the web, nor does established politics have any serious need to pay court to an online constituency. The web isn’t going to transform the nature of politics in this country any more than it is anywhere else. What’s steadily more damming of its pretensions is that the parties, rightly, show no interest in trying to transform the web. For if one thing’s as sure as an unsubbed typo in an online rant, it’s that, if the web mattered politically, politicians would regulate it into good order.

For the duration of the campaign, the Social Affairs Unit will be publishing regular commentaries on the progress of the UK election. These commentaries represent the views of the anonymous commentator, not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees, Advisors or Director.