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Wilson, Jason A. and Bruns, Axel and Saunders, Barry J. (2008)
Super Rehearsal for November. In ABC News Online: ClubBloggery, Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Copyright 2008 (The authors)

Club Bloggery: Super Rehearsal for November
By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns, and Barry Saunders
It’s almost a cliché now to assert that the US blogosphere is an election-cycle ahead of what
we have in Australia.
We’re not so sure it’s that simple, mostly because it seems that online, independent media
are on a slightly different developmental track on this side of the Pacific. But it’s certainly truethat the American online mediasphere is flexing some fairly impressive muscles in thepresidential primaries.
This year’s election season will be one to watch, and it might just be the one in which online
coverage - from bloggers and the MSM - outstrips television and the press in depth andimportance.
It should be said at the start that the US political blogosphere is a lot more polarised, various
and influential than Australia’s.
As we’ve pointed out before, Australia’s bloggers are overwhelmingly left-of-centre: we might
have our equivalents to the left-leaning Daily Kos but it’s hard to pick out our own equivalent
to Little Green Footballs or Town Hall, where Australian conservatives can form communitiesof opinion and respond back (except maybe at Tim Blair’s blog).
Australia’s blogosphere is less diverse in some other ways as well - like the US we have a lotof serious commentary, but few sites given over to “snark”, or snide remarks, like the US
liberal site, Sadly No! The US blogosphere is now courted by political candidates, with Kos’s
endorsement being sought by Democrat hopefuls, and prominent right-wing bloggers lunchingat the Bush Jr White House.
For all their apparent influence, though, so far the bloggers can’t turn elections - or at least
primaries - in quite the same way that the MSM can. Most of the so-called “netroots” America’s online left-wing grassroots activists - were backing candidates much further to theleft than Clinton or Obama: people like John Edwards or Dennis Kucinich. On the right, many
prominent Republican bloggers got behind the Republican “establishment” candidate, Mitt
Romney, but they weren’t able to swing the voters behind him to a sufficient extent to keep
him in the race.
Outsider Republican Ron Paul - a libertarian - had amazing support online, but his poor
showing at the polls was more evidence that libertarianism seems a lot more sensible on theInternet than it does to the voters on the hustings. After an initial burst of interest in the antiwar Republican candidate (particularly on Digg.com), online revelations of his history of racist
politics and pandering to conspiracy theorists turned a lot of people off.
Agitate, Educate, Organise
Nevertheless - like the shock-jocks - most of the value of the prominent bloggers on eitherside of politics seems to be in fulfilling the old political imperative: agitate, educate, organise.
Granted, there may be less emphasis on “educate” than might ideally be the case, but US
bloggers - with their actually and proportionally larger audiences - are able to galvanise
supporters into keeping the faith between elections, and making the trip to the ballot-box onelection day in a country where voting is not compulsory. They aren’t bound, as the MSM are,to gravitate towards the perceived centre in their political coverage. So they’re able, asinternet-powered “monitorial citizens”, to develop a constituency for bolder positions.
That’s why there is a significant cross-over emerging between the MSM and the blogospherein the US - something that we’re yet to see significant evidence of in Australia. News services

like CNN and Fox News employ bloggers, and many pundits like Michelle Malkin and Keith
Obermann maintain independent blogs alongside their MSM responsibilities.
(Tim Blair maintains a blog alongside his gig as the Daily Telegraph’s opinion editor, andPeter Martin blogs while working as the economics editor of the Canberra Times, but we have
yet to see Kerry O’Brien or Ray Martin start a blog.)
Such bloggers are able to offer immediacy, forthright opinions and real-time reflections onpolitical events that, in the past, the mainstream media have struggled with. They are alsoable to connect with their particular constituencies in a climate of political opinion that isarguably more diverse than ours. They also work effectively to expand the Overton window to popularise positions that are outside the current parameters of debate.
This works in both directions - just as Michelle Malkin opens up debate on immigration bystaking out a position in favour of internship of ethnic minorities, Amanda Marcotte opens up
discussion of health insurance by supporting universal health coverage.
Established news services like The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post haverecognised this, and had live bloggers covering Super Tuesday - their comments sections
became more and more lively as the evening went on.
Perhaps even more fascinating this Super Tuesday, though, was the first significant
incorporation of social media in the election coverage. “Microblogging” service Twitter teamed
up with Google Maps in order to visualise their users’ own coverage of the primaries, andYouTube offered a very similar service embedding links user-generated videos in a map of
the United States .
These mashups are the beginnings of new kinds of platforms for crowdsourced, citizen-led
coverage of political events, which differ radically from any established patterns of news
coverage.
We’ll be watching with interest as November’s general election draws closer.

First published at Gatewatching:
http://gatewatching.org/2008/02/16/club-bloggery-super-rehearsal-for-november/
Also published in a condensed version at ABC Online:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/14/2162953.htm