Comment: Frittering away trust in the blogosphere
Everyone recognises that bloggers will play a critical role in the imminent general election campaign. But if it’s the one demonstrated last Friday the campaign could get dirty, with a hidden cost for the bloggers themselves.
By Matthew West
Rumours circulating the internet on Friday that the government would call a March 25th election over the weekend proved to be nothing more than speculation.
Several high-profile bloggers indicated that meetings had been cancelled and media staff were being asked to forego weekend leave in anticipation of the announcement.
Conservative blogger Iain Dale and ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie falsely claimed Ladbrokes had suspended betting on a March 25th election while right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes claimed all bookmakers had stopped taking bets on the date.
The editor of Labour blog Left Foot Forward, Will Straw, wasn’t going to let them get away with that however, pointing out that the pronouncements coming from Montgomerie, Dale and Guido were untrue.
In his blog post he revealed how Montgomerie used his Twitter account to tweet: “I’ve just been txted that Ladbrokes have suspended betting on March election”.
What was of more concern was when City AM political editor David Crow took up Montgomerie’s cause tweeting himself: “Lots of rumours at Westminster that Brown about to call an election. Top Tories have cancelled all meetings,” which was then retweeted by the Guardian’s Ian Katz.
But when politics.co.uk contacted Ladbrokes on Friday their spokesman confirmed they were still taking bets on all available dates, including March 25th.
Meanwhile, several other bookmakers suspended betting in late January after an apparent slip by defence secretary Bob Ainsworth confirming the election would be held on May 6th.
Straw in his blog accused the right-wing bloggers of trying to “stir the pot” ahead of the Conservative Spring Forum in an attempt to mitigate the damage being caused by the dramatic collapse in David Cameron’s lead in the opinion polls over Gordon Brown and drum up some publicity for the conference.
There may be some truth to this but in the interests of fairness and balance it is worth pointing out that Straw has a fairly famous father, Jack, the current justice minister.
Leaving that aside the question remains: to what extent can bloggers be trusted as sources of news and what is their influence on the imminent general election campaign likely to be?
While trust in journalists is at an all-time low bloggers would be well advised to be careful what they say as well. Bloggers currently have a wafer-thin veneer of credibility having broken a couple of big stories ahead of the mainstream media but nonsense such as the little spat that broke out on in the internet on Friday will surely see that diminish pretty rapidly.
Journalists themselves would do well to check their facts a little more thoroughly as well, rather than react instantly to what they see published elsewhere. While the internet has undoubtedly sped up the process of breaking news to break neck speed, giving these kinds of rumours an inch of room creates greater problems with the delivery of information to the public and continues to undermine their trust in journalists.
It is worth noting that Twitter was used by Montgomerie as the prime method of attack in this instance, allowing him to use a degree of plausible deniability. On Twitter there is less need to act responsibly and there is little or no accountability. Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes were a little braver, or potentially more naive, by actually writing their claims on their blogs as if they were facts.
Montgomerie was contacted by politics.co.uk for comment but has yet to respond. If he had replied to our request for comment, he would no doubt have said that he was simply tweeting a rumour he had received by text and nothing more.
Putting a claim such as this on his own blog would have presented several problems, not least of which would have been the need to back the claim up. ConservativeHome is slightly different to Iain Dale’s Diary and Guido Fawkes in that it is part funded by Conservative Party deputy chairman (and non-dom) Lord Ashcroft, so it has a finer line to tread.
The damage that this little campaign may have caused to Gordon Brown and the Labour party is likely to have been minimal. Anyone that reads the right-wing blogs or follows their authors on Twitter is likely to have been persuaded of two things some time ago. First, that the bloggers know more than the journalists. And second, that Gordon Brown needs to be got rid of and is a weak prime minister. Convincing such readers that Brown might have been considering a snap election last weekend but then backed away from it like he did in October 2007 would not have been hard, far-fetched as this most certainly was.
There are a multitude of reasons why there was never going to be a snap election, not least of which is the fact the country would go to the polls before GDP figures for the first quarter of 2010 were released. It would also preclude the possibility of a Labour Budget before the election which Alistair Darling has already said there will be.
Aside from this there is a slightly smaller reason that a snap election won’t be called. This one is about logistics. Most of the journalists that are going to be covering the election already know it.
Each political party invites journalists to become accredited for each party’s daily press conference. You can’t get into the press conference without it.
That accreditation process is still ongoing: accreditation hasn’t closed yet. It’s a very small thing you might think but it’s enough for us to know there won’t be an election announcement for a little while yet.
But what’s more worrying about Friday’s little episode is the extent to which outright lies could become truth as bloggers on all sides try to sling as much mud at each other as possible.
While there is a debate among the high command of all three main parties about whether their campaigns should focus on the positive or “go negative”, what we might see is an unofficial negative campaign being fought by all sides on the blogosphere. Essentially this could be the first general election campaign in which the blogosphere is used to distribute black propaganda by each party about the others. If this happens the bloggers could find the trust they have nurtured over the last five years evaporates very, very quickly. And if it does this will be the only election in which they have a say.
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