Editor’s view: Numbers show Premier needs traditional media

The social media frenzy that surrounded Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk during the pandemic has tanked, writes the editor.

There is a saying in politics – sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill, but actually from a far less known British conservative MP, Enoch Powell – that politicians complaining about the press is like sailors complaining about the sea.

That is, that the two rely on each other – and while the sea can often turn choppy and dangerous, without it you can’t do your job.

Just like sailors, politicians need the media to get to their destination. They have as much control over the media as sailors do over the ocean, but the best ones from both these ancient professions learn how to work with their unavoidable dance partner. The silly ones don’t.

There has been a growing belief inside the executive branch of the Palaszczuk government over the past few years that in the age of social media it might no longer need the traditional news media to get its message to voters.

Its senior media strategists have convinced Ms Palaszczuk to put this theory to the test – copying the successful tactics of Victorian Labor Premier Dan Andrews and seconding staffers from other ministerial officers to a team of up to 30 (they won’t tell you how many) media specialists attached to the Premier’s office whose sole job it is to deliver information through social media, tailored to make the government look good.

This appeared a stunningly successful strategy as the pandemic took hold in 2020 and 2021, with sometimes literally hundreds of thousands of views of every one of Ms Palaszczuk’s press conferences that were beamed live to her taxpayer-funded propaganda social channels.

In fact the success was such that there is now a view within at least some quarters of the Premier’s office that the news media is no longer relevant, such is the reach and engagement of that audience.

But it now turns out that the vast majority of those views – and a sizeable chunk of that engagement – were from Queenslanders worried less about politics and more about the impact of Covid-19, and so turned to Ms Palaszczuk’s channels looking for live and unfiltered information in those daily press conferences.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk takes a selfie.

But today we reveal figures that we doubt those running the propaganda team have presented to Ms Palaszczuk – that show that with Covid-19 now just a part of life, the engagement on her social channels has tanked, with views of the videos posted on Ms Palaszczuk’s behalf having dropped 10-fold in just six months, and interactions having more than halved.

On Facebook the number of people following Ms Palaszczuk has stopped growing, while on Instagram they have been falling away steadily since April.

Those who are left are not engaging to the same extent they were during the pandemic, with interaction rates on Facebook over the past month for One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson more than three times that recorded for Premier Palaszczuk.

In total, Ms Hanson had 270,785 interactions in the past 30 days. For Ms Palaszczuk this was 236,016.

Now these are still large numbers. The Courier-Mail, for instance, had just shy of 600,000 Facebook interactions in the same period, so Ms Palaszczuk’s interaction numbers are not to be sneezed at.

We also understand this is 2022, and so being able to harness the power of social media is important for any government. We would maintain that taxpayer-funded staff should not be employed to publish propaganda, but we are not naive and so accept this is inevitable (as shown by the fact her spokesman responded to our questions by erroneously saying “more and more Queenslanders” were turning to Ms Palaszczuk’s online platforms as a “source of important information”).

We do, however, think these numbers should be a wake-up call to those smart people around the Premier that they can’t go it alone as much as they, like any political outfit, would love to totally bypass the news media and journalists.

But it is also not just about the numbers. There are surely many people in the Premier’s office who still believe in quaint notions such as trust in government.

If so, they must accept that Griffith University political scientist Dr Paul Williams is right when he warns of the danger in governments using social media to dress-up partisan spin as news.

This is, he rightly says, because: “If it doesn’t pass through that filter of neutrality, objectivity, critical thinking, balances of sources and voice of reason, and then people are looking at it thinking, ‘well it looks like news’, then I think that – no matter which party is doing it, it’s … lamentable and dangerous.

“When you’ve got people putting out ‘news’ with political objectives, and their first loyalty is to a political party … it can only end badly.”