gatewatching

Thanks for your note, and for making your readers aware of our blog and ABC columns.

I’m happy to discuss your questions, but first, it might be useful to clarify a few things.

This could be a good moment to point out that this blog and our ABC column are different from the rest of our work, including the research project you mentioned in your original post. The column and the blog are things we do on our own time. We certainly aren’t “paid to blog”, nor are we paid for our ABC column. So those of your readers who are in a tizz about their tax dollars going on these particular activities can relax. We do these things because of our genuine interest in the ways in which online public affairs is developing, and because we’re keen to test some ideas out in public. We’ve never represented the blog or the columns as the place where we present the formal, final results of our research - it’s much more a way to present hunches, hypotheses or - we have them too - opinions.

The blog is a mostly a place where we archive our ABC columns, and where we occasionally post on other stuff. It’s not designed as a high-traffic blog: it’s unlikely we’d have the time to maintain it if it were. It could do with a little more attention, as you’ve pointed out, but we’re not primarily bloggers - we are more focussed on our jobs. You and your readers have been critical of how little material is on there, but I suspect we’d find it very hard to please you. A more active record of posting on the blog would no doubt give rise to the charge that we are “wasting taxpayers money by blogging all day”.

We might have imagined that our blog and columns would please at least some of your blog community - rather than confining ourselves to those infamous “ivory towers”, which are such a cherished part of anti-intellectual rhetoric, we’re actually mixing it in venues like the ABC’s Opinion pages. And not only there - we’ve all had a range of opinion pieces published beyond the world of academic journals. We will continue to do this because we want to be involved in a broad discussion about the development of the blogosphere, online journalism, citizen journalism, etc. We also feel like we owe it to the broader community to talk about the research we’re doing. In this sense, then, I for one actually welcome your interest, and your critical attention to our work.

For what it’s worth, by the way, our research project (which, just in case I wasn’t clear enough first time around, should be distinguished from the blog and the columns) is an ARC Industry Linkage Project, which means that taxpayers’ investment in our research is supplemented by investments from commercial partners. You can criticise the overall structure of research funding in Australia if you like - we think that there’s room for improvement too - but there’s no point arguing that the research is without real-world significance when business is prepared to stump up cash and support to get it done.

You and your readers may be interested to note that, despite the hoary cliches about “lefty academics”, the project team contains a broad spectrum of political opinion, and people who aren’t academics at all. The National Forum, publishers of On Line Opinion, are the industry partners who have, perhaps, been most closely involved in our collaborative activities. Of course, the founder and chief editor of OLO is Graham Young, a businessman, formerly a Vice President of the Queensland Liberal Party, and a conservative blogger himself - your readers might enjoy his stuff over at ambit gambit. It may seem shocking to you and some of your readers that people with divergent political views can work together constructively, and that business might be interested in ideas to the extent of funding, and collaborating in, research, but there it is.

One of the major things that the project has achieved so far - apart from a whole lot of published research - is creating and maintaining youdecide2007, which was an open citizen journalism forum covering the federal election. This was open to all comers, and itself featured a range of opinion from across the political spectrum, and involved people from across the country in reporting on the federal election as it was happening in their electorate. The election might still be a sore point for you and your readers, but I’d encourage you to check it out, and see for yourself that in our research projects, we’ve got no agenda except encouraging people to have their say online, experimenting with innovative ways to do it, and making the results of our projects available to the public. The site carried over 200 submitted articles from people around the country during the campaign, broke a few stories and had a community of well over 1500 users. Not bad given the short time-frame.

I must say I’m a little surprised by the strength of your reaction to our ABC columns. I think that we have managed to be reasonably even-handed in our treatment of the blogosphere, and we’ve mentioned a range of right-wing bloggers, including yourself, without any partisan comment about the contents of those blogs. We like debate and diversity in the blogosphere. We’ve criticised the left-wing blogosphere, too, or at least raised questions about what they’re going to talk about now that their major target of criticism, the Howard Government, is no longer around. I never really saw our work on the column as out there on the fringes of the left, and it’s telling that your case for this rests on a very small range of quotes, and, if I may say so, a whole lot of rhetoric.

Anyhow, I suppose we should get to your questions.

You claim to have pointed out that “Australia’s bloggers are overwhelmingly left-of-centre”. Yet the linked piece identified no such thing, and in fact appeared not to be concerned at all with the political allegiences of Australian bloggers. Could you please indicate a specific section of that piece supporting your claim?

Oops - our bad - perhaps this one, an earlier column, is the one we should have linked to. But it’s not as if we hadn’t tried to point this out before, or that we’re alone in this opinion. So, it’s a mistaken link rather than an attempt to retrospectively manufacture a history of having made a claim, which would in any case have been an odd and pointless thing to do. But is this what you were getting at in your criticism? It’s hard to tell… Are you suggesting that Australia’s blogosphere isn’t mostly left-of-centre? (More on this last question below, but there is some empirical evidence for our claim from Axel, here.)

You claim that Australia is home to “equivalents to the left-leaning Daily Kos”. Could you please name these sites? (Note: Daily Kos attracts around one million hits per day. Proportionally, an Australian blog would be pulling in around 60,000 daily hits to be of similar local impact.)

There’s a big problem with the method of comparison that you’re suggesting. First of all, are you really suggesting that you can simply port numbers across like that as a measure of a blog’s relative popularity or influence? Are you really suggesting that there is a simple, linear relationship between the Australian and US blogospheres, where you can simply divide hits by the national population as a gauge of relative popularity? The US has a completely different political culture to Australia. For example, non-compulsory voting provides a much greater imperative for mobilising party activists and potential voters alike between elections, which is in turn a huge stimulus to the development of blogs and online communities of all political persuasions. Australia’s blogosphere is at an earlier stage of development than the US, and there are other local factors in Australia that need to be taken into account. As almost half of your audience comes from the US, and less than a third from your home country, I imagined that you may be aware of these complicating factors.

Perhaps we’re better off thinking about the communities around blogs - the pertinent question is, then, are blogs home to a lively community, and regular, ongoing debate? Axel and other researchers are experimenting with ways of quantifying this, but maybe we can just think it through for a moment. It’s obvious that Daily Kos is - are there any sites in Australia that are roughly equivalent in their political persuasion, and which play host to an active community? I think Larvatus Prodeo might be one candidate - they post regularly, attract a lot of comment, and their traffic (at least according to Alexa) is comparable (I don’t say equivalent) to your own. RTS, Possum and Tim Dunlop are among the other examples of left wing blogs with active reader communities. (For some of them, traffic has tailed off since the election, but I notice that yours has recently too, Tim.)

But I’d put the question to you - beyond yourself and Andrew Bolt, what are the other examples of conservative bloggers who consistently can be seen to stimulate and maintain an active community of interest in Australia? Catallaxy might be a candidate, but not all of the authors there would consider themselves as conservative in the same sense as you guys. We could begin to think about the Australian columnists - like Janet Albrechtsen - who repost their columns but who don’t take too much of an active role in their blogs beyond that. For these reasons, among others, we’d still maintain that left-leaning voices are more prominent in the Australian blogosphere. If you disagree, I’d like to hear more.

Jason theorised that “the left-of-centre blogosphere has prospered in Australia” because “opinion pages only seem to be open to forthright conservatives”. Would Jason classify Catherine Deveny, Richard Ackland, Traceeee Hutchison, Mike Carlton, Kathy McCabe, Phillip Adams, Sue Dunleavy, Richard Glover, Jill Singer, Alan Ramsey, Kenneth Davidson, Anne Summers, Peter Hartcher, Annabel Crabb, Michael Leunig, Michelle Grattan, Tim Colebatch, Martin Flanagan and Adele Horin as “forthright conservatives”?

Your objection to this is fair as far as it goes - the problem in my original formulation is the word “only”. If it were replaced by “largely”, I think it would hold. I posted this with half an eye on Insiders, but I’d also point out that the remainder of the post actually praised Andrew Bolt for at least expressing an opinion.

Although there is, obviously, space for left wing columnists if we consider every newspaper in the country, I’d still argue that there is a preponderance of right wingers, and this is especially true in particular markets. In Brisbane or Perth, for example, there is really only access to two newspapers - the Australian and the single, local, News Ltd. metropolitan daily. So, in Brisbane, over the course of the week, I can read right-wingers in the Oz like Milne, Albrechtsen, Shanahan, McCrann, Colless, Pearson, Devine, Salusinszky, Sheridan and (arguably) Pearson, and have this balanced only by Philip Adams and (maybe-he’s-a-lefty) Steketee. A very healthy proportion of the occasional opinion-writers are also on the right. I’d argue that the remainder of the columnists in the Oz are pretty well neutral, which means that the paper, on the whole, leans to the right in its opinion pages. Were I to turn to the Courier-Mail for an alternative, I might be able to say that Terry Sweetman is some kind of left-winger, but syndicated columns by Andrew Bolt and Glen Milne more than outweigh him; the rest of the columnists are either pretty well neutral, or confine themselves to “lifestyle” discussions. If you go out into country Queensland, many local papers (like the Townsville Bulletin) don’t have any appreciably left-wing voices at all. Just to emphasise this point, then: there is an appreciable preponderance of right-wing opinion in certain metropolitan and regional markets, even if we can point to left-wing columnists in some newspapers. If you are in Sydney or Melbourne, and buy every daily paper, you might be able to offset the right-wing slant of the Oz, and very prominent conservatives in the News Ltd. tabloids, like Andrew Bolt, but I hardly think you could argue that conservative opinion is swamped in any market. The general point holds, I think, and in specific instances it is certainly true that conservative opinion outweighs neutral or left-wing voices.

You might say that left-wing opinion is available online, and that anyone can go to the SMH’s opinion pages no matter where they live, but that argument has no end - you can always enlarge your frame of reference by referring to the online world.

You claim that “Tom Switzer’s resignation as the editor of the Oz’s opinion pages” is a “clear sign” that “hard-right columnists [are] looking increasingly isolated”. How did you reach that conclusion?

This was a bit speculative. This is the kind of thing that happens when you’re generating opinion in response to recent events, and that’s why, once again, I’d distinguish between our opinion pieces and formal research findings. Still, we need to be accountable for them as opinions. Perhaps it could have been better if we’d said that Switzer’s departure “may be” a clear sign that things are changing at the Oz. And there’s no doubt that his leaving to work for Nelson so soon after the election at least invites questions as to whether the Oz is planning to change its roster and approach, in the face of changes in the broader political landscape. (If you’ve got another explanation you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear it. We’re scholars - we’d much prefer to have our hypotheses challenged than lapse into doctrine).

The larger point we were making was one that might actually be pleasing to you - that sometimes left bloggers rely overly on criticising MSM conservatives, but that if there is a diminishment of the pre-eminence of right-wingers in organs like The Oz, they may struggle to find as many things to talk about. I wouldn’t resile from the call that some hard-right columnists seem pretty isolated, though: when I read columns like this, set against the election result, the opinion polls, and what seems to me to be the changed framework of politics in this country, I wonder how large the constituency for these political positions can possibly be.

Anyhow, I doubt that any of these responses will have satisfied you or many of your readers, in part because I think you have us pinned as instances of one contemporary conservative folk devil, the “lefty academic”, and your fun depends on not recognising any more complexity than that. That’s fine - we’ll cope. I am also aware that your style of blogging doesn’t necessarily aim at an extended or nuanced discussion of the issues it raises. (This isn’t necessarily a criticism, either - I think there is a lot to learn from the way in which you mobilise an international audience by using hot-button phrases and ideas, like “lefty academics”.)

But irrespective of our divergent political views, I’d invite you to consider the way in which the whole Australian blogosphere might benefit from an analysis of its history, its strengths and weaknesses, and its relationship to the mainstream media. Indeed, I would be genuninely interested to find out more about your own history as a blogger, and what your own aims were and are in starting and running a political blog. Please contact us if you’d be willing to do an interview with us - we’re talking to a whole range of bloggers, journalists and pollies about the impact of the Internet on journalism and politics.

In any case, I think that, unless you have more to add,  this particular exchange might longer be productive. I will expect your readers comments, and thanks again for your contribution.

Your sincerely,

Jason

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