I have become hooked on a small number of political blogs. Each morning, then again before lunch and once more in the evening, I log on to blogs that take the form of rolling political comment, analysing the news rather than reporting it.
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_m_z/steve_richards/article2826129.ece
Steve Richards: How the bloggers are making politics more febrile, more fun - and more challenging
Such frequent engagement makes it harder for leaders to reform or manage their parties
Published: 02 August 2007
I have a confession to make about a relatively new habit. I do it at least three times a day. Such is the relentless pull that I shall be indulging at least once as I write this column. For the moment the addiction is not especially harmful to me, but might be to others, especially leaders seeking to get a grip on their parties.
I have become hooked on a small number of political blogs. Each morning, then again before lunch and once more in the evening, I log on to blogs that take the form of rolling political comment, analysing the news rather than reporting it.
Too much is made these days of the impact on politics of the 24-hour rolling news channels. The channels have the capacity to make fleeting political twists seem more dramatic than they really are, with their headlines every 15 minutes and their "Breaking News" banners that greet every minor development. But in the end the stations do not change the course of events. If the sense of political drama is exaggerated, reality intervenes sooner or later and the channels move on. The blogs are different. They can have an influence on events.
Let me come clean and give a full explanation of my addiction. For a long time I kept clear of political blogs, assuming that they were as irrelevant as vox pops or the emails read out by presenters on political programmes. Emails and vox pops are meaningless and should be banned by broadcasters. At the end of Prime Minister's Questions, for example, Andrew Neil reads a series of emails from viewers giving their immediate reactions: "Burt Thung writes that Gordon Brown was hopeless, but Joan Thing has emailed saying she thought Brown was much better than David Cameron."
Who are Burt Thung and Joan Thing? Is Burt an ardent Tory and is Joan a passionate Labour supporter? We do not know the answers. People's views are only illuminating when they come with a background. Instead Burt and Joan are shapeless, without a past or even a present. They might be fascinating individuals, striking barometers of the political mood, but we will never know enough about them to find out.
The bloggers are different. We know a lot about them - too much, perhaps, if you are an addict. My favourites are Iain Dale, a former Tory candidate and publisher; Ben Brogan, the political editor of the Daily Mail, Conservative Home, started up by Tim Montgomery, who worked previously at the party's HQ; and The Spectator's Coffee House, a blog from those who write for the weekly magazine. All are updated regularly.
Dale sometimes manages to break stories, such as the appointment of Andy Coulson as David Cameron's press secretary. Brogan offers elegantly insightful instant assessments, and is as fair to Gordon Brown as he is to Cameron.
Conservative Home is a site of feverish energy with contributors ranging from Shadow Cabinet members to local activists. The Spectator site is the equivalent of meeting a friend for coffee and talking politics, though sometimes it veers into other areas - such as the latest Barbra Streisand concert.
Obviously I am aware of the common connection and slightly alarmed by it. The blogs to which I am hooked are all associated with the right. Why is this? I spend a lot of time, probably too much, reflecting on the oscillating fortunes of the Labour government. And yet when the craving gets too much I head off to the sites listed above.
Probably part of the reason for the blogging hyperactivity on the right is the current turmoil in the Conservative Party. When a party seeks a new sense of direction after three election defeats there is scope for endless debate, heightened by fleeting moments of fuming anger and joyful euphoria.
Presumably in the late Seventies and and early Eighties, there would have been addictive blogs putting the case for Tony Benn. They would have been countered perhaps by must-read sites from those heading for the SDP. I guess left-of-centre bloggers would have flourished when Labour was overwhelmed by civil war. Now Labour is more settled and will be thrown into blog paradise/crisis only if it loses the next election.
Yet this cannot be the full answer. Republican blogs in the US thrived even when their presidential candidate won the last two elections. In the US too, it is the right-wing phone-in hosts who make waves whatever the wider political context.
To be honest I do not know the full reason for the blogging pre-eminence on the right.
What I do know for sure is that the blogs are making politics more febrile. I am not alone in reading them. Politicians do so all the time and so do editors of television programmes. Dale has become a regular pundit, appearing on television much more than if he had won a seat at the last election and become a mere elected MP. When Cameron makes an announcement or gives an interview, he gets an almost immediate response from activists on the Conservative Home website. Sometimes the verdicts are far from flattering.
Their influence can be measured by current attempts to counter dissent by setting up a new site for Cameroonian loyalists. Overall, Conservatives voices are heard like never before. Not so long ago this was a party that had an annual conference, which was little more than a week of loyalist flag-waving. There were no formal outlets for activists to register their views. Now they do so every few hours.
Such frequent engagement makes it harder for leaders to reform or manage their parties. They have less space to move without noisy dissent surfacing. I wonder how long Labour's leaders in the 1970s and 1980s would have coped in the internet age. Their annual conferences were partly week-long displays of dissent. If there had been a Labour Home site then, activists would no doubt have exploded with rage at the leadership most minutes of the day. It would have been required reading.
We, or rather I, should not get carried away. Newspapers continue to matter much more than blogs. The judgements the newspapers make in the coming months will have more impact on the outcome of the next election than any blog or television news bulletin.
When newspapers give their verdicts on Brown and Cameron they become big news stories. Broadcasters are not allowed to give judgements in the same way. In his early months, Cameron and his entourage failed to recognise this, assuming wrongly that a 30-second clip on a television news bulletin was what shaped opinion. Cameron has appeared on a lot of television bulletins recently and look at the opinion polls.
The significance of the blogs is that they are an additional influence to newspapers. Their influence will grow, not least on the Tory leadership as it embarks on the final stage of the party's policy review policy review. Time to log on.
s.richards@ independent.co.uk
Such frequent engagement makes it harder for leaders to reform or manage their parties
Published: 02 August 2007
I have a confession to make about a relatively new habit. I do it at least three times a day. Such is the relentless pull that I shall be indulging at least once as I write this column. For the moment the addiction is not especially harmful to me, but might be to others, especially leaders seeking to get a grip on their parties.
I have become hooked on a small number of political blogs. Each morning, then again before lunch and once more in the evening, I log on to blogs that take the form of rolling political comment, analysing the news rather than reporting it.
Too much is made these days of the impact on politics of the 24-hour rolling news channels. The channels have the capacity to make fleeting political twists seem more dramatic than they really are, with their headlines every 15 minutes and their "Breaking News" banners that greet every minor development. But in the end the stations do not change the course of events. If the sense of political drama is exaggerated, reality intervenes sooner or later and the channels move on. The blogs are different. They can have an influence on events.
Let me come clean and give a full explanation of my addiction. For a long time I kept clear of political blogs, assuming that they were as irrelevant as vox pops or the emails read out by presenters on political programmes. Emails and vox pops are meaningless and should be banned by broadcasters. At the end of Prime Minister's Questions, for example, Andrew Neil reads a series of emails from viewers giving their immediate reactions: "Burt Thung writes that Gordon Brown was hopeless, but Joan Thing has emailed saying she thought Brown was much better than David Cameron."
Who are Burt Thung and Joan Thing? Is Burt an ardent Tory and is Joan a passionate Labour supporter? We do not know the answers. People's views are only illuminating when they come with a background. Instead Burt and Joan are shapeless, without a past or even a present. They might be fascinating individuals, striking barometers of the political mood, but we will never know enough about them to find out.
The bloggers are different. We know a lot about them - too much, perhaps, if you are an addict. My favourites are Iain Dale, a former Tory candidate and publisher; Ben Brogan, the political editor of the Daily Mail, Conservative Home, started up by Tim Montgomery, who worked previously at the party's HQ; and The Spectator's Coffee House, a blog from those who write for the weekly magazine. All are updated regularly.
Dale sometimes manages to break stories, such as the appointment of Andy Coulson as David Cameron's press secretary. Brogan offers elegantly insightful instant assessments, and is as fair to Gordon Brown as he is to Cameron.
Conservative Home is a site of feverish energy with contributors ranging from Shadow Cabinet members to local activists. The Spectator site is the equivalent of meeting a friend for coffee and talking politics, though sometimes it veers into other areas - such as the latest Barbra Streisand concert.
Obviously I am aware of the common connection and slightly alarmed by it. The blogs to which I am hooked are all associated with the right. Why is this? I spend a lot of time, probably too much, reflecting on the oscillating fortunes of the Labour government. And yet when the craving gets too much I head off to the sites listed above.
Probably part of the reason for the blogging hyperactivity on the right is the current turmoil in the Conservative Party. When a party seeks a new sense of direction after three election defeats there is scope for endless debate, heightened by fleeting moments of fuming anger and joyful euphoria.
Presumably in the late Seventies and and early Eighties, there would have been addictive blogs putting the case for Tony Benn. They would have been countered perhaps by must-read sites from those heading for the SDP. I guess left-of-centre bloggers would have flourished when Labour was overwhelmed by civil war. Now Labour is more settled and will be thrown into blog paradise/crisis only if it loses the next election.
Yet this cannot be the full answer. Republican blogs in the US thrived even when their presidential candidate won the last two elections. In the US too, it is the right-wing phone-in hosts who make waves whatever the wider political context.
To be honest I do not know the full reason for the blogging pre-eminence on the right.
What I do know for sure is that the blogs are making politics more febrile. I am not alone in reading them. Politicians do so all the time and so do editors of television programmes. Dale has become a regular pundit, appearing on television much more than if he had won a seat at the last election and become a mere elected MP. When Cameron makes an announcement or gives an interview, he gets an almost immediate response from activists on the Conservative Home website. Sometimes the verdicts are far from flattering.
Their influence can be measured by current attempts to counter dissent by setting up a new site for Cameroonian loyalists. Overall, Conservatives voices are heard like never before. Not so long ago this was a party that had an annual conference, which was little more than a week of loyalist flag-waving. There were no formal outlets for activists to register their views. Now they do so every few hours.
Such frequent engagement makes it harder for leaders to reform or manage their parties. They have less space to move without noisy dissent surfacing. I wonder how long Labour's leaders in the 1970s and 1980s would have coped in the internet age. Their annual conferences were partly week-long displays of dissent. If there had been a Labour Home site then, activists would no doubt have exploded with rage at the leadership most minutes of the day. It would have been required reading.
We, or rather I, should not get carried away. Newspapers continue to matter much more than blogs. The judgements the newspapers make in the coming months will have more impact on the outcome of the next election than any blog or television news bulletin.
When newspapers give their verdicts on Brown and Cameron they become big news stories. Broadcasters are not allowed to give judgements in the same way. In his early months, Cameron and his entourage failed to recognise this, assuming wrongly that a 30-second clip on a television news bulletin was what shaped opinion. Cameron has appeared on a lot of television bulletins recently and look at the opinion polls.
The significance of the blogs is that they are an additional influence to newspapers. Their influence will grow, not least on the Tory leadership as it embarks on the final stage of the party's policy review policy review. Time to log on.
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