Donald Trump at a campaign rally (Image: EPA/Trent Sprague) In our relentless news and politics cycle, Australia’s media and political elite are grappling with a big question: why are our leaders, and the traditional parties they lead, so unpopular? What the pollsters call “net satisfaction” languishes in the negative for both major party leaders. The combined vote of the main parties in the last election fell below 70% for the first time. It’s a global trend.
In just about every country, political leaders from all sides poll poorly, and parties are dividing and multiplying. It’s also a feature of the social media age. For the past decade, the resentment, anger and uninformed cynicism that social media rewards (and a desperate news media mimics) has been fragmenting politics and subsequently disempowering change.
The commentariat love it because disruption makes news. But even as they join in, the political press corps insist on analysing this new world using their understanding of the old. Tucker Carlson’s Australian tour ticket prices have been slashed with hundreds of seats still available Read More Media analysts have long recognised that the medium of the moment shapes the politics of the time: mass newspapers imagined nations (and nationalism) into being, according to Benedict Anderson ; Marshall McLuhan identified that radio made engaged tribes; in the ’80s Neil Postman concluded that mass broadcast television delivered a politics of passively consumed li.
