I posted a few months ago saying that The Sun can’t win elections any more or even influence them in the same way they once did.
This election is proving that to be the case. Yesterday after the press rounded on Nick Clegg after his success in the first TV debate and on the cusp of the second TV hustings, the twittering classes hit back. The hashtag #nickcleggsfault was essentially a crowd sourced piss-take that said we don’t have to take whatever politically motivated guff you throw at us and the choice is ours not yours.
The Murdoch media are however hanging on to the old ideas of influence and boy have they had a concerted go in the last 24 hours pushing a YouGov poll on Sky News that was out of step with all others and that the pollsters have admitted today that they used a flawed process. The Sun has even been accused of suppressing polls that are out of step with their support for the Tories.
However we are now facing the absolute racing certainty of hung/balanced parliament, so the only party guaranteed to be part of the next administration is the Liberal Democrat party. When media owners realise that they can’t be certain of backing the winner they will back off from nailing their colours to the mast. The backlash begins.
PR and the Social Web 
It will be interesting to see what the polls say next week. I think you’re right – the papers’ influence is waning, but I don’t think Twitter is a good indication of anything, it’s too niche for that.
Our summary of the back lash http://pniq.co.uk/2010/04/23/the-week-in-pr-7/
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by robbrown: Why The Sun’s political days are numbered http://bit.ly/dzHDCI…
lemondrizzle
I disagree that Twitter is too niche as an indicator.
Look at this recent graph from Twitter itself about its international growth. And there is only a finite number of “usual suspects” (PR, marketing, SEO, porn) out there to populate it.
This time with link: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/04/growing-around-world.html
Lemondrizzle – I’m with Jon on this I think that not only is twitter a great place for sampling and observing opinion I also think that recent events have called into question some of the practises of the pollsters practises http://generalelection.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/was-yougovs-flawed-leaders-debate-poll-deliberate-or-merely-inept/
although the former is clearly no substitute for the latter
I am totally sick of reading newspapers soaked in political opinions. News is supposed to objective and impartial, but it never has been. I much prefer online sources of news now rather than print. I am a first time voter and I realise that, so it’s about time journalists did to.
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http://clairebea88.wordpress.com
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