We had a bumper politics news conference today, kind of a pre-election war cabinet meeting without the Dr Strangelove-style giant map of the world.
There was much to discuss. What will be the big issues? Who is going to write what? How much space do we keep aside for non-politics commentary? Does the fact that we are all very excited make it an exciting election, or is the national jaw outside the beltway stretching into an epic yawn?
Conversation also turned to that crazy interweb thingy we hear so much about, and what it might mean for the election. A tricky one. Articles about how this will be the first real internet campaign are kind of like the pieces in the business pages every Christmas about how this year everyone will be doing their shopping online. It gets a bit truer each time, but there's no quantum leap and suddenly we're all transmitting our votes telepathically through magic Blackberry chips embedded in our heads.
The internet is - shock! - rather like the rest of the world. There's an election. So guess what? Bloggers blog about it. It'll be great reading of course. Funnier and sharper than a lot of what will appear in the 'mainstream' media. And good bloggers will feed the appetites of lazy busy newspaper diarists. But TV is surely what will win it.
Meanwhile, here's a thought for people who think that the internet is a momentous force that changes the world at a click of the mouse:
Amount of time, energy, verbiage, google-rank tampering and multi-purpose vitriol expended on vilifying Microsoft and Bill Gates and denouncing them as evil on the internet - much.
Effect on Microsoft's brand and market share and share price outside geeksville - not much.
What else happened at Politics Conference? An interesting discussion about how and when to raise the issue of asylum and immigration in the newspaper. It comes up in polls and on doorsteps as a big campaign concern, but so much of the debate has been confected and inflated by an unholy alliance of Tory strategists and rightwing press. If you wait for a news peg to appear before kicking off on the subject - even from a liberal viewpoint - you are allowing the nasty brigade to set the agenda. And yet if you kick off about it spontaneously you are gratuitously putting the issue centre-stage. (Cue tangential bemoaning of media-myth-making such that would make Chomsky smile. Whether he we imagine him smiling in agreement or at the irony of it we haven't quite worked out yet.)
And the conclusion? We await with eagerness and a degree of trepidation the first Dan Rather moment of this election.
