Social media: Hard-nosed sniff test gone to the dogs

Political analysts have pointed to problems with traditional polling that did not predict the Tory win in Britain last year, the Brexit vote in June or the rise of Donald Trump.

Polling specialists think published polls failed in these cases because many voters did not ­reveal their true leanings to pollsters, believing their intentions were too unfashionable to state openly. That is, they intended to vote for Brexit but the media had told them only uneducated voters would do so. So they did it anyway but did not disclose their plans to pollsters.

A similar issue of trust and confidence is affecting the relationship between news consumers and media. I believe it is closely related to the move of journalism, and particularly journalism education, to the Left, and the increasing role of social media in the distribution of news and commentary.

Like people being polled and not revealing their true intentions, readers and viewers are being misread by both media companies and politicians because modern website blogs are to the right of mainstream public opinion and social media to the left.

This is contributing to both the polarisation of our media and politics and the hollowing out of the centre in both. At the same time advocacy groups have gained more control over the agenda of journalism. This is not necessarily sinister and may just reflect the declining resources of newsrooms.

But serious news professionals know it is much easier for a well funded non-governmental organisation to get its message across today than it was a decade ago. Even an organisation as prosperous as the ABC is easy prey for gay activist groups, animal rights groups, and conservation lobbies. Just listen to the radio news on your local ABC station.

Once a news editor, hard-bitten and sceptical but in touch with the views of the audience, would be all over the story. It would need to pass his or her sniff test and then be followed up with balancing quotes from individuals and organ­isations taking the opposing point of view. Now it just gets a run as emailed to the newsdesk.

Young journalists at university are being served lashings of social activism and released into the media world without the one quality we were once schooled in during our cadetships: scepticism. Your average middle-aged news consumer might not have the same tertiary qualifications as the newly minted journalism or communications degree holder but they sure have good lie detectors.

This is the real problem with ­allowing young journalists to ­engage in ideological and political warfare on Twitter, something The New York Times is now ­discouraging. Readers are meant to be able to trust the byline of the person writing a story.

But if, for example, that reporter is writing about NSW Premier Mike Baird’s greyhound racing ban and at the same time has produced hundreds of tweets in favour of animal rights campaigns, will readers trust the work of that journalist? I think not.

If you think I am exaggerating check the tweets of Bernard Keane and his advocacy for ­animals and then ponder whether his political commentaries on the issue are ­impartial. He has been tweeting about dogs and more lately ­donkeys for several years and literally dozens of times a week. Why should we trust his analysis of Baird’s ban, overturned just last week, to Keane’s horror?

Well, we should not. The ban proved unpopular in the real world even if social media loved it. The Twitter and Facebook world, as Baird really should have known, was not the real world. And so-called tabloid “legacy media”, derided on Crikey, in Fairfax and the ABC, turned out to have a lot more influence than the Baird ­office realised. So it was back to Alan Jones for dinner and back to The Daily Telegraph with exclusives on overturning the dog ban.

For me the moral posturing of many in the Left media about Baird’s reversal was an objectionable display of post-materialist schadenfreude by the over­privileged kids of Sydney north shore and eastern suburbs families looking down their noses at ­working people’s interests.

Once the mission of the Left media was to encourage government to give a hand up to the less educated and less fortunate. Now it is to encourage feelings of moral superiority among the middle class over the working classes who are derided for enjoying activities such as racing greyhounds.

Baird announced his ban on Facebook midyear. One of the KPIs of the government’s social media advertising contract on the greyhounds ban was the number of Facebook “likes”. Rather than attempt to learn how the voters actually viewed the ban, it relied on social media to take the pulse of the electorate.

This raises a big issue for politics: the effect of the young, social media activist staffer on politics on both sides, and gets us close to the nub of the failures of prime ministers since the fall of the Howard government in 2007.

Once upon a time prime ministers had their own personal rapport with the electorate. Good PMs met real voters rather than tweeting to them. They had real plans for the country and knew that getting two or three big things done each term was the best that could be achieved within the three-year election cycle.

If a government sold the benefits of tough decisions to the electorate it could achieve difficult reforms. Think the seven versions of the Accord with the trade union movement to restrict wages growth and improve productivity in the 1980s. Or the GST or the guns buyback in the 90s.

But in today’s politics, as ­Marshall McLuhan foresaw in the 60s, the medium is the message. While it sounds like a television comedy the truth is the public ­service has been relegated behind the interests of the political staffer. And for today’s modern staffer, likely to be in their late 20s or early 30s, the daily messaging, winning the nightly television news message and now winning on social media, are the pre-eminent tasks of government.

Last year and early this year we saw the Turnbull government damage its economic credibility with a series of public thought bubbles about increasing GST and refusing to change the rules on superannuation and then doing exactly that.

Social media is changing our world. What better way to keep in touch with family and friends than Facebook? What a simple way, in 140 characters, to join a club of opinionated, like-minded and thoughtful (or not) people Twitter is.