It was the closest UK general election in decades, and the Twitterverse was agog - but it was old-media television that people turned to for the story, writes Robert Wainwright.
When it comes to election-night coverage, I’m a political tragic – happiest alone in a lounge room in front of the TV where I can concentrate on the unfolding ballot box drama.
It is the one time when politicians, confronted by the realities of numbers, drop the shackles of spin and admit their fears of loss or utter cautious claims of victory. Votes mount, count percentages climb and seats hold or fall. Analysts predict, retract and call again. The tension builds and by midnight there is usually a result – roughly the time of a Twenty20 cricket international.
So it was with much anticipation that I switched on the BBC coverage of the UK election in May to watch the expected demise of Labour, the return of the Tories and the rise of the Liberal-Democrats.
There was presenter David Dimbleby – suave, silver and understated – who’d fronted election nights since the 1970s, and the abrasive Newsnight host Jeremy Paxton, backed up by an array of visual technology, splashing exit poll results predicting a hung parliament on the tower of Big Ben and even counting the flagstone steps along Downing Street to the door of No.10.
But the whole thing fell flat. By midnight just three of the Parliament’s 650 seats had been declared, the only drama a rush by one northern council to declare in record time. Others would not even begin tallying until the next morning, rendering Paxton’s attack-dog questions almost meaningless and leaving the technological flagstones loitering at the top of Downing Street.
Internet and social media coverage concentrated on concerns about voters being turned away at some booths because of varying interpretations of voting laws by local officials – the confusion caused by a clearly antiquated electoral system which panders to role play and village hall tradition rather than the increasing complexities of modern politics.
The excitement only began to mount early the next afternoon as the flagstones filled step-by-step for David Cameron, falling agonisingly short of the glossy black door as Dimbleby, still suave and silver 18 hours after the broadcast began, declared the exit polls had been unerringly accurate.
Then the human drama began. It would take a week for Gordon Brown to yield to the inevitable bitter divorce from the British public as David Cameron and Nick Clegg agreed to an unenviable marriage of convenience. The BBC, Sky and ITV camped on the lawns of Westminster Square where coverage was maintained by a constant line of commentators; as one columnist later wrote, reporters “flitted like crazed pigeons between 19th-century buildings ... pecking nuggets of spin from the ether”.
Newspapers – whose pre-election coverage mostly lacked policy rigour in favour of overt partisanship – dwelt on analysis of the previous day’s negotiations and what might happen. Websites, many with rolling screens of updates, were left scrambling to fill uneasy gaps or were forced into bold predictions, such as a memorable announcement by one news site of an agreement in principle between Cameron and Clegg, only to be swamped an hour later by Brown’s announcement that he would resign as the UK’s PM to help secure a Labour coalition with Clegg’s Liberal-Democrats.
There had been enormous anticipation in the election build-up about the role of social media, much of which did not exist when the last election was held in 2005. But the impact was limited, perhaps even peripheral, and certainly far from influential. Facebook’s triumph was that 14,000 users downloaded voter registration forms in the lead-up to the election while roughly 30,000 Twitter users (around the same number as for a soccer match) were active during the three leaders’ debates.
The consensus post-election was that Twitter was used mainly by party hacks to mobilise supporters or generate disquiet, such as the Tory attempt to discredit Nick Clegg – #nickcleggsfault – in the wake of his clear first debate victory. Cameron told The Guardian newspaper: “I’m not on Facebook, I don’t tweet. Social media, I don’t really get. Politically I know it’s a great opportunity; personally, I don’t want to be ‘poked’ or whatever it is.”
There is no doubt that social media has its role in speeding up news cycles. It’s used by many old-media journalists to update fast-breaking stories and it’s engaging more people than ever before. But the evidence of its actual influence is confusing and, at least for now, a measure is virtually impossible. One site, The Media Blog, reported a survey of 1055 users which concluded that almost 70 per cent of the respondents read more newspapers or watched more TV because of the election, and 82 per cent said social media such as Facebook and Twitter had been the cause of their involvement.
Another firm, Echo Research, described the use of social media as “game changing” and claimed 50 per cent of people turned to the internet for their information. Facebook, it said without providing evidence, had been better at addressing policy such as health and the economy than traditional media.
Yet their survey of 1024 voters also showed that face-to-face discussions at the pub far outweighed social media as being influential, and that television was the most trusted source of information, with more than a third of those surveyed saying TV was more important in 2010 than five years before.
By comparison, British media research company Dollywagon concluded: “Twitter doesn’t seem to have rocked the boat too much ... Twitter’s role in the election campaign was limited to providing an outlet for partisan views and the sharing of General Election ‘Oh my God’ moments”.
The biggest gaffe of the campaign was in the dying days when Gordon Brown was caught on an open microphone referring to voter Gillian Duffy as a bigot. Again, it was a moment created by television and enhanced by radio. YouTube reported less than 60,000 views.
Likewise the debates, a first for a UK election, which turned a flagging campaign into the most exciting in memory and confirmed the power of television. There were 330,000 YouTube viewers for the first debate but that fell away to a handful for the second and third. By comparison, the Britain’s Got Talent clips over the same period each got between two and three million hits.
The debates themselves were not only new to Britain but raised the notion that government was a more complex proposition than the leaders of the two major parties. The Liberal-Democrats were not just a third wheel in the system but an acknowledged force, and their leader (and now deputy prime minister) Nick Clegg stood on camera between Gordon Brown and David Cameron, quite literally, as a bridge between the two extremes.
The idea of a new political direction became the dominating narrative for the last weeks of the campaign. In the end, voters decided Clegg wasn’t the white Obama the polls bounce after the first debate had suggested, but his impact was enough to ensure a hung parliament and show that the electorate is capable of taking notice when offered an issue of substance. It also highlighted the danger of mainstream media such as newspapers, which had previously largely ignored Clegg, in over-filtering their views.
Veteran British television presenter Jon Snow insisted the internet would “augment” but never replace television news, declaring: “New media is more dependent on what we do now than it was 10 years ago. Google did not put the helicopter above Downing Street when [Gordon Brown’s] car departed for the palace. It’s all about content, content, content and people forget that at their peril ... It’s no good thinking citizen journalists are going to tip out on to Downing Street and give us HD pictures of Mr Brown leaving Downing Street.”
Peter Kirwan, writing for The Guardian, concluded: “The new [media] ways remain weaker, and less influential, than anyone guessed. On dangerous ground, the old ways persist.”
Robert Wainwright is a London-based senior writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and two-time Walkley finalist.
Cartoon by Lindsay Foyle, a freelance cartoonist and writer.
