Is there still a ‘crisis in public communication’ (if there ever was one)? The UK experience

Introduction: The public sphere reconsidered

Any discussion about a ‘crisis’ in political or public communications must, either implicitly or explicitly, take as a starting point Jürgen Habermas’ (1989) notion of the public sphere, subsequently revised and amended by Habermas and others (e.g. Calhoun, 1992; Goode, 2005). There has been much debate about the historical accuracy of the underpinning concept – for Dahlgren (1995), ‘a melancholic historical narrative’ (p. 8). The argument of this article is that Habermas’ characterisation does contain some theoretical shortcomings and historical inaccuracies, but neither diminishes the underlying importance of the notion of the public sphere as a conceptual tool for investigating the discursive processes of contemporary politics – a view that echoes Castells’ (2008) description of the public sphere as ‘a useful intellectual construct’ (p. 80).

In discussing the contemporary public sphere, this article will be using the term in the generally accepted sense of the word, rather than in any specific Habermasian sense, that is, as a space where the private realm, the economic sphere, organised civil society and the political class notionally come together – mediated by both the traditional and new media – to discuss current events, formulate policy and initiate political action (Curran, 1991). Of course, unlike the coffee houses of Habermas’ articulation, the contemporary public sphere is no longer, if it ever was, a single group of merchants and political writers discussing new ideas and formulating political demands. The contemporary public sphere is multi-faceted, as Habermas himself latterly conceded when he wrote that it was probably unhelpful ‘to speak of one public sphere’ (Calhoun: 424). Todd Gitlin (1998) sees the ‘unitary public sphere’ as ‘weak, riddled with anxiety and self-doubt’ (p. 170). Thus, it seems that something of a consensus has developed around the notion of there being not one discrete public sphere but a series of smaller overlapping ones – for Gitlin (1998), ‘sphericules’, or for Dahlgren (1995), ‘many and multi-dimensional public spheres’ (see also Gitlin, 1998; Gripsrud and Moe, 2010; McNair, 2000; Temple, 2006).

Some of these spheres will reflect policy areas (health, education etc.), some will represent special interests (disabilities, ethnicity, faith groups) and some will have a geographic demarcation. These spheres, or sphericules, are neither discrete between themselves nor do they necessarily have national boundaries – both the growing significance of diasporic communities as important sites of global mediation (Silverstone, 2006) and the increased role of transnational businesses and international organisations (such as the European Union) have made these smaller spheres overlapping, porous and fragmentary. However, at the centre of these spheres is what can be characterised as Dahlgren’s (1995) political public sphere (p. 7) – the politicians, the civil servants and the media.

While this characterisation of the political public sphere pre-dates the digital revolution, it remains highly pertinent today, despite it being dramatically transformed by the changes in information and communication technology which we have witnessed over the past three decades. There are no longer single conversations taking place within, and between, the sphericules and the central political public sphere; instead, there are a multitude of cacophonous voices talking and, occasionally, shouting at each other. And the digital revolution has meant that the speed and quantity of information and opinion being publicly exchanged has increased exponentially.

But the key question to be addressed relates to the tenor of the discourses, and the resulting policy decisions that flow from them – that question is, does a surfeit of information and opinion improve, or actually diminish, the quality of decision-making and hence the quality of our democracy? The answer relates back to the main theme of this article – is there (as Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) termed it) ‘a crisis in public communication’? If the answer is yes, then a further question is begged – namely, is the crisis more or less fixed in nature or is it dynamic and, in normative terms, can the direction of travel be seen as positive or negative? Or was there never a crisis in the first place?

There are a number of electronic straws in the wind suggestive of the possibility that contemporary political communications are in the process of changing, or appearing to change, what Gans (2010) has termed the ‘democratic conversation’, and that this transformation is not necessarily for the worse.

Blumler’s developing ‘crisis in public communication’

In considering the health of the political public sphere, I am focussing on the central relationship within that sphere, namely, that between journalists and politicians. One of the key texts in this area is Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) who were among the pioneers of a systemic approach to the study of political communications and were among the first to identify the ‘Crisis of Public Communication’, based on their almost 30 years of observing election coverage at the BBC between 1966 and 1992. When Blumler first began researching election coverage in the United Kingdom, he did not perceive it to be in ‘crisis’. In one of his first studies Blumler and McQuail (1968) concluded that the political communications system in the United Kingdom, as they observed it during the 1964 election in the United Kingdom, was functioning well, giving the maximum number of citizens the chance to be exposed to the views of the main political parties (p. 286). And when Blumler and Gurevitch looked at political communications in the elections of 1983 in the United Kingdom and 1984 in the United States (Semetko et al., 1991), they compared Britain favourably, noting that in the UK election, coverage was less game-orientated, more substantive, gave politicians more scope to set the campaign agenda, less professionalised and that British journalists’ attitude to politicians was more ‘sacerdotal’ than ‘disdainful’ – their two principle descriptors. They attributed these positive attributes largely to the existence of a sizeable public service broadcasting sector in the United Kingdom which was imbued with what they described as a ‘civic mission’ (Semetko et al. 1991).

However, in the light of their later observations at the BBC, they subsequently revised their verdict on the British system, charting a declining public service broadcasting ethos which they held as being largely responsible for what they were now calling a ‘crisis’ in public communication. They observed that journalists (not just in the BBC) were becoming ever more ‘disdainful’ of politicians in their election coverage. They suggested that journalists viewed politicians and parties through an increasingly cynical lens and saw election coverage more and more in terms of a contest – not between the politicians but between the politicians and the media. In this contest, the journalists first sought to decode how the politicians were attempting to gain control of the daily election news agenda and then were seeking to devise strategies as to how to nullify such manoeuvres (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 104). This approach they contrasted with what they had described earlier as a more ‘sacerdotal’ approach to election coverage – the notion that journalists, particularly public service broadcasters, assumed that they had an obligation to provide the fairest election coverage possible as part of the democratic political process (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 56).

In The Crisis of Public Communication, Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) observed that as a result of this increase in pragmatic coverage, the political communication process was tending to ‘strain against, rather than with the grain of citizenship’ and they warned ‘our civic arteries are hardening’ (p. 203). They described the crisis as involving an ever-increasing cynicism among political reporters – pace the infamous quote by BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman, ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ (Wells, 2005), an emphasis upon politics as a game played by both sides, an intensification of competition among and between politicians and journalists, an exponential growth in sources of political news and opinion and finally ‘the emergence of a post-deferential culture’ (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 206). The consequences of this crisis, as they saw it, was to create a general sense of cynicism about politics among the public, an emphasis on politics as a game rather than as a means of policy formulation and implementation, an exclusion of the public from the political process and a ‘catapulting’ of the press into ‘a position of surrogate opposition’ (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 214).

However, by 2001, Blumler and Gurevitch were starting to wonder whether the digital revolution could, in their words, be ‘redemptive’ because ‘the Internet allows direct communication between citizens and politicians, enabling both to bypass the media. Here, then, may lie the Internet’s greatest potential for change’ (Blumler and Gurevitch, 2001). Blumler was, at this stage, conflicted; both wondering whether the Internet might not represent a means of transcending the crisis, at the same time as he was interpreting the crisis as worsening.

In 2009, Blumler (with Coleman and Gurevitch) wrote about the ‘viral energy’ that Web 2.0 has brought to the political public sphere, talking about a ‘flow of incessantly circulating publicity’, but noted that in contrast with the older media, in this new environment, ‘The digital media environment does not respect the integrity of information’ (Blumler et al., 2009) But behind this assertion lay the questionable notion that in a pre-digital age, politicians’ messages were disseminated without significant distortion – perhaps a case of ‘golden ageism’? Blumler and colleagues were also concerned that the new digital environment might reinforce the digital divide serving ‘… to strengthen the voices of the privileged, leaving citizens with limited resources, skills, or confidence reliant upon a narrowing range of mass-media sources providing shallow political information’ (Blumler et al., 2009), suggesting that the older media but were in retreat from covering politics in response to the growing amount of political discussion taking place in the digital environment. Five years on, it is difficult to find evidence to support this apprehension. More pertinent is their observation that while the online environment provides a space for robust political discussion, it plays a small role in the process of policy formation. And their concern that the digital political public sphere operates in the context of ‘a disorientating sense of being technologically connected, but politically disconnected’ fuelling a sense of ‘civic disengagement’ (Blumler et al., 2009) is extremely pertinent in an age of ‘insurgency politics’ to use Reno’s (2002) terminology as we witness the rise in support of political groupings and parties, of both the left and the right, that are outside of what was seen as the mainstream. These groups ranging from the worldwide ‘Occupy’ movements, to Beppe Grillo’s Five Star movement in Italy, to UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, have been adept at exploiting the potential of the Internet – particularly social media – to propagandise, recruit and organise.

Writing in 2010, with Stephen Coleman, Blumler anticipates this rise in ‘insurgency’. He suggests that publics who now take for granted the efficiency of online shopping and other services might find the way that politicians, and journalists in the older media, communicate politics to be seriously flawed. He suggests this as the other side of insurgency that might seek to ‘punish’ the political elite ‘by turning to dangerous, extreme parties’ and talks about the process as potentially ‘sapping the vitality of democratic political culture’ (Blumler and Coleman, 2010). They describe the media/politics nexus as ‘a toxic relationship … [leaving] citizens experiencing increasing unease, confusion, and scepticism’ (Blumler and Coleman, 2010). But, at the same time, they suggest that the new media might be ‘redemptive’ – a means of reinvigorating the political public sphere. They call for what they describe as a new kind of public institution – an ‘online civic commons’. This, they suggest, could enhance the political public sphere and ‘[do] for democratic citizenship in the digital age what public service broadcasting did for analogue democracy’. Such an institution, they argue, could create a means for journalists, politicians and the public to reconnect, acting as a clearing house for the views of the citizens which should then be promoted and developed as cues for political action at both the local and national level.

But Blumler and Coleman do not fall prey to dewy-eyed optimism, noting that such a development would meet resistance from the established political parties that exist as bodies to win votes, not bodies to enhance democracy and from journalists working in the older media who would see their existing power and influence threatened. But the authors hold out to them a new role which would entail ‘… their traditional function of making available pluralistic information and holding the powerful to account, while at the same time creating opportunities for citizens to act upon information and challenge power holders’ (Blumler and Coleman, 2010) – an inspiring vision.

‘News Intensification’ and the growth of spin

However, even if the suggestion that the digital revolution is opening up new discursive spaces which might allow ordinary citizens to have a greater voice might be seen as over-optimistic, these new spaces are nonetheless having a major impact on the lives and working practices of politicians, journalists and campaigners. ¹ Political journalists’ daily routines are now virtually unrecognisable from those described by media scholars in the middle of the last century (Gaber, 2000, 2011, 2013a; Hencke, 2011; Seymour-Ure, 1968; Tunstall, 1970). As a result of the digital revolution, a process of ‘news intensification’ – with journalists having more (much more) news and information at their disposal but, at the same time, having to service a whole myriad of new platforms – has been underway (Gaber, 2011, 2013a, 2013b; Hencke, 2011). Long gone are the days when the gentleman correspondent, sitting in one of Westminster’s many bars and watering holes, would glance at his watch at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and ask himself (and it was almost invariably a ‘him’) ‘On what am I opining about tonight?’ Instead, journalists now find themselves serving many, arguably too many, platforms leaving little time for thought, reflection or verification – a state of affairs captured by the Guardian’s David Hencke (2011), who, when as Chair of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, wrote,

… while two decades ago a reporter could get away with just one story for next day’s issue, now that same reporter can find him or herself with quadruple the amount of work. Not only does the paper’s website want an instant story, but it may require a political blog on that story, an update for the next day’s paper and a podcast for that evening’s refreshed website. (p. 54)

But there have been other substantive changes taking place in the media captured by terms such as ‘dumbing down’ (Barnett, 1998), ‘tabloidisation’ (Esser, 1999), ‘infotainment’ (Franklin, 1997) and ‘churnalism’ (Davies, 2006). These terms relate both to particular changes, but they also suggest a decline in the quality of the information available to the public on the major political issues of the day – in terms of political coverage, this argument points to the increased attention given to personal scandals, trivialisation and the growth of the celebrity culture in politics. Although there is no shortage of evidence to support this contention, two observations need to be made. The first is that while the quality of political information and commentary might have declined, there can be no gain saying that the actual quantity of information available to the public has never been greater. On a daily basis, there has been a marked increase in daily newspaper paginations, the BBC’s 24-hour radio and TV news channels and Sky News update events on an hourly basis, the political websites and blog spots diffuse political information minute-by-minute and political news pours out of Twitter literally every second. And although it would be fallacious to argue that ‘more means better’, the arguments of those who claim that there has been a marked decrease in the quality of political information available to the public via the mainstream media might be right, but equally, it might simply be the case that the increased quantity of trivialised political information distracts from the, arguably, increased level of serious coverage of politics that can now be found in UK newspapers and on the main television and radio channels.

The other observation is that at the same time as political journalists have been learning how to live with this intensification of news, so too have those on the other side of the wire – the politicians and their media teams. As the demand for political news has increased (if not among audiences, certainly in terms of the available time and space to be filled in both the traditional and new media), so too has the power of the media managers increased as the demand for their ‘product’ outstrips supply. In one sense, this has always been the case in that the sophisticated media managers, or spin doctors, have always known when, and when not, to feed the ‘feral beast’ of Tony Blair’s imaginings. Although Blair (2007) himself conceded that New Labour, under his leadership, did overplay this particular hand when he said: ‘We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media’.

There is nothing new in governments seeking to control the media, Lloyd George, a century ago, gave one of the best definitions yet of spin doctoring when he said, ‘The Press? What you can’t square you squash and what you can’t squash you square’ (Margach, 1978: 13). Nonetheless it is clear that the growth of the spin culture, even before the process of news intensification really gained momentum, was making a profound difference to the day-to-day relations between politicians and journalists. ² Two examples will suffice. The first relates back to this author’s experience working in broadcasting back in the 1970s. Then, if a broadcaster required an interview with a particular politician – front or backbencher – then he or she would more often than not simply go to the Members’ Lobby of the House of Commons (no mobile phones, or pagers in those days) and make a direct approach, or leave a message for the relevant politician asking him or her to phone. Now such an approach would be unthinkable. Even the humblest of backbenchers has a team of researchers, secretaries and even spin doctors, who simultaneously seek to erect a wall around their politician to protect him or her from unwelcome media approaches but also to act as celebrity agents seeking to place their ‘star’ in as many desirable media outlets as possible. Requests for interviews – ‘bids’ as they are known in the trade – have to be made through the correct channels, and are as frequently turned down as accepted.

The second example relates to the ‘supply’ of political news. Before the advent of the Internet, politicians’ main means of communicating with the media was through the printed press release, either delivered by hand, or left on a table in the House of Commons’ Press Gallery. Journalists could stay abreast of almost all contemporary political happenings by a daily glance at the press table, turning up for the occasional news conference and attending the twice daily briefings given by the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary. The briefings remain (although they are now, in summary form, also posted online), but virtually everything else has changed. The Internet, email, social media and text messaging are now the parties’ and politicians’ principle means of communicating with the media, and the flow is unceasing. In just 1 month (March 2013), the Labour Party posted 131 press releases on its website, an average of more than four a day. ³ Politicians, or in most cases members of their staff, now send/spin their own messages, or rebut their opponents’, using new media, on an almost 24/7 basis. The scope for the creative spin doctor is almost unlimited. Although it is worth pointing out that when it comes to political spin, one size does not fit all. For example, the styles of media management adopted during Prime Minister David Cameron’s first year in office contrasted sharply with that adopted by Tony Blair’s team in their first year (McCrory and Gaber, forthcoming).

A digital dawn?

But it would be fallacious to suggest that the degree to which communications between politicians and journalists has been so dramatically transformed in recent years has only been a matter of degree. The change has been substantive, and the real question is whether that change has improved or degraded the quality of the ‘democratic conversation’ and hence the effective functioning of the political public sphere. Certainly, there are those scholars of political communication (e.g. McNair, 2003; Norris, 2000) who have argued that the culture of ‘spin’ has, on the whole, been beneficial to the process of greater public understanding of politics. They argue that the increased use of techniques of media management by politicians has resulted in greater clarity in their communications, as they, and their advisers, seek to hone a message into ideas and language that are more easily understood by the general public. The process has also, as Sky’s former Political Editor, Adam Boulton, has suggested, given journalists greater insight into politicians’ thinking and has also given them a greater flow of authoritative information with which to work, compared to the days of the ubiquitous ‘No comment’ (Boulton, 2012).

On the other side of the argument, a number of scholars (Barnett and Gaber, 2001; Franklin, 2004; Jones, 1995, 1999, 2002) have seen in the greater practice of the so-called ‘dark arts’ of spin, a trend that has enabled politicians to craft messages that conceal as much as they reveal, seducing potentially friendly journalists and neutralising potentially hostile ones – in other words ‘spin control’, a trend this author noted more than a decade ago when he (and his co-author) wrote: ‘One of the most significant developments within the British political system over the past few decades has been the establishment of “presentation” as the central philosophy not just of the practice of politics but of its content as well’ (Barnett and Gaber, 2001: 96).

Spin aside, a more positive argument can be made about the current state of political communications in Britain – one that links to the guarded optimism of Blumler and Coleman (2010). The argument is that as a result of the digital revolution, we could be witnessing not just the beginnings of the end of ‘spin’, but the creation of a healthier political public sphere. For the democratic conversation, for so long dominated by the voices of the politicians and journalists, can now be joined by literally anybody with access to a computer or mobile device and an Internet connection, resulting in the demarcation lines between mainstream political journalists, politicians and the public (as citizen journalists, campaigners, bloggers, or simply individual responders to an online debate) becoming increasingly blurred. While recognising that an article, and even a blog posting, by an established political correspondent from a traditional newspaper or broadcasting outlet still has far more impact and influence than the unknown citizen journalist opining on her own personal BlogSpot, this is increasingly becoming only a matter of degree.

The 2014 independence referendum in Scotland provides evidence to substantiate both the arguments of cyber-utopians (e.g. Shirky, 2009; Benkler, 2006) and dystopians (e.g. Hindman, 2009; Morozov, 2012), or at least those who argue for the continuing primacy of the traditional media. According to Facebook, more than 10 million interactions were made about the referendum fight in a month. The ‘Yes’ campaign page had 320,000 ‘likes’, compared with 21,800 for the ‘No’ page; and the official Twitter account of the ‘Yes’ campaign had 103,000 followers compared to 42,000 for the ‘No’ campaign. The then leader of the Scottish Nationalists, Alex Salmond, boasted 95,000 Twitter followers, while Alistair Darling, the leader of the ‘No’ campaign had just 21,000. But, there was more to this than these bare figures, indeed these figures can be misleading since, given the energy of the ‘Yes’ campaign, it was unsurprising that its supporters were more publicly demonstrative in their support than were the understandably reticent to show their ‘No’ voter colours.

Given the result, a victory for the ‘No’ campaign by 10 percentage points, cyber-sceptics, to coin a less dichotomous term, might say that all this proves is that the impact of the social media has been much over-stated. However, the context has to be borne in mind. That context was first that throughout the long campaign, all the UK national newspapers and all the Scottish press, bar one, supported the ‘No’ campaign and did so with particularly force over the last few weeks of the campaign, following a surprise poll showing the ‘Yes’ vote marginally ahead. Second, that from the time the referendum was announced up to the surprise, the ‘No’ lead had rarely been out of double figures. In other words, despite the overwhelming support of the traditional media, something shifted, and some research suggests that the shifting was brought about by the impact of new media.

After the vote, News (publishers of the Times, Sun etc.) commissioned a YouGov poll which they hoped (indeed expected) would indicate the continuing influence of the traditional media. Initial figures were, from their point of view, hopeful when they showed that 60 per cent of respondents (the poll size was 1648) said they had received ‘a significant or very large amount’ of information from newspapers and their websites, while the comparable figures for social media and the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ camps own websites were 54 and 44 per cent, respectively ⁴ (Haggerty, 2014). However, closer inspection of the YouGov figure suggests a different story, for the pollsters found that when respondents were asked about the information that they thought had actually influenced their voting decision, 39 per cent said it was information from social media and other websites that was most influential, compared with 34 per cent who said newspapers. However, at 42 per cent, TV and radio were deemed the most influential source (30% said they found information on the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ websites the most useful when deciding how to vote) (Haggerty, 2014).

However, there is also evidence from the Scottish campaign that offers some support to the more dystopian critics of the rise of social media. The political correspondent of Sky News, Sophie Ridge, reported that like many other journalists, ‘I have experienced aggressive tweets while covering the referendum’. One BBC journalist was forced to delete 400 abusive tweets from his timeline. The National Union of Journalists said they have logged many incidents of offensive comments towards reporters on social media and were, at the time, considering reporting them to the police.

So all this digital activity begs the question, can one reconcile this massive tidal wave of news, information and opinion with the notion formulated early in the last century by John Dewey who suggested that the ‘cultivation of a culture of communication’ should form the basis of a civilised democratic discourse (Dewey, 1927)? Some scholars (Davies, 2009; Dutton, 1996) have suggested that cyberspace is no place for nurturing such a culture, but as Blumler and Gurevitch (2001) noted, users of new technologies begin to ‘adjust their behaviour in line with what are perceived to be the medium’s distinctive characteristics’ (p. 5) – and there is more recent work to support such an argument.

Zizi Papacharissi has investigated the tone and texture of the online democratic conversation and concluded that it was more ‘civil’ than anecdotal evidence might suggest. She looked at the competing claims of, on the one hand, those who might be characterised as cyber-utopians, who suggest that the online environment offers a discursive space that increases political participation and, in her words, could ‘pave the road for a democratic utopia’, against the claims of the cyber-dystopians who say that political discussion on social media is ‘fragmented, nonsensical and enraged’ (Papacharissi, 2004: 260). She looked at the extent to which online debate could be described as ‘civil’ by investigating 300 such debates and found, perhaps surprisingly, that amid some shouting and screaming – and contrary to the anecdotal evidence – most of the posted messages were in fact ‘civil’. She suggested that this was because cyberspace does not involve face-to-face communication, and she concluded that her study ‘supported the internet’s potential to revive the public sphere’ (Papacharissi, 2004: 280).

A few years ago, it might have been tempting to dismiss the online debates and discussions as being confined to relatively small groups of techno-savvy obsessives, but that line is now difficult to hold. Latest figures suggest that 40 per cent of the UK adult population now access news digitally on mobile devices, the highest rate in Europe (Dutton and Black, 2011), that two-thirds of UK consumers now visit at least one social media site every day (Ofcom, 2011) and that 60 per cent of all Internet users in the United Kingdom maintain some form of online profile – the highest penetration rates for social networks anywhere in the world (Newman, 2011). Hence, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the growth of social media might just signal the beginnings of the fulfilment of Habermas’ notion of ‘universal access to the public sphere’ that scholars have identified as critical to its realisation (Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994: 9). One straw in the wind is discernible in the October 2014 mid-term elections in the United States when the Pew Research Center found that the number of Americans who had accessed election news on their mobile phones had increased from 13 per cent in 2010 to 28 per cent in 2014 for all adults, and in the 18–29 years age group, the figure was 28 per cent in 2010 and 43 per cent in 2014. Perhaps even more tellingly, the same research found that the number of Americans following a political party or candidate on Facebook or Twitter had risen from 6 per cent in 2010 to 16 per cent in 2014, and for the 18–29 years age group, the figures were 14 and 24 per cent, respectively. The Pew report comments, ‘Cell phones and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are playing an increasingly prominent role in how voters get political information and follow election news’ (Smith, 2014).

The politicians’ response

And it is not just one-way traffic on the information super highway – more and more politicians are now listening and responding to voices from cyberspace. Not so many years ago, any politician who took the trouble to draft a press release, even hand-written, and take it up to the Westminster press gallery was regarded as almost a cutting edge communicator. Today, the majority of MPs use social media, often as their main form of public communication, with Twitter the fastest growing medium. As of April 2014, 409 out of 650 MPs had Twitter accounts, compared with 331 in 2012 and 51 in the year before that. ⁵ Although just because an MP has a Twitter account it does not mean that they can be considered active users of the service (Margaretten and Gaber, 2014). Usage can vary enormously. A recent paper from the Parliament Street think tank discovered that one MP – Di Havard – had just 56 followers and had yet to tweet (as of April 2013); on the other hand, another – Tom Watson MP – had over 90,000 followers and sometimes tweeted up to 40 times a day. ⁶

Twitter might be one way of reversing some of the negative trends that have been discussed in this article. In a jointly authored paper with Margaretten, this author has noted,

Crisis scholars generally hold that the rift between the public and politicians threatens democracy, and they look towards the ability of Computer Mediated Communications (CMCs) to expand and redefine the public sphere as a means of addressing mistrust and reversing the trend towards a widespread de-legitimising of democratic institutions. (Margaretten and Gaber: 2)

Conclusion

However, it is always wise to be cautious when hailing the arrival of ‘a new dawn’ (in Tony Blair’s memorable phrase on the morning of his 1997 election victory); as Blumler and Gurevitch (2001) observed, ‘Politicians and their publicity advisers will certainly not be automatically cleansed of their original communication sins just by the advent of the new media!’ (p. 6). But there are other straws in the electronic wind – in addition to the research findings discussed above – that are suggestive that even if the new dawn hasn’t yet broken, the darkness of the night is beginning to fade. Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake was first elected to the Commons in 1997; he is now Deputy Leader of the House of Commons and a enthusiast. He boasts of having 5000 followers (almost a quarter of his actual vote) and fervently believes that social media are having a major impact on the quality of British democracy. Writing for the Huffington Post, Brake (2013) says that, for him, social media is a vital tool for reaching his constituents. He believes it has made him a better MP and has also forced him to rethink how he engaged with local people; as a result, he has modified his behaviour, taking into account that his constituents see themselves just as much as ‘consumers’ as ‘voters’. And the experience has reinforced his belief that people will engage with politics but only if the political debate is pitched to them in terms that they find accessible (Brake, 2013).

Brake’s enthusiasm for social media might be premature, but for those who have been writing about, and pondering, the crisis in political communication, it certainly provides, at the very least, pause for thought, if not radical revision. As Blumler and Coleman (2011) predicted,

… the Internet allows direct communication between citizens and politicians, enabling both to bypass the media. Here, then, may lie the Internet’s greatest potential for change. After widespread new media diffusion, the relations of politicians, audiences and the ‘old media’ may not be quite the same as before.