ANALYSIS:It was only after a FG tweet that mainstream media could catch up with online bush fire, writes HUGH LINEHAN,Online Editor
BY THE time Brian Cowen had completed his 13-minute interview on Tuesday's Morning Ireland, the social networking site Twitter was already lighting up with derisive comments about his performance.
At 8.55am, before the interview had finished, the discussion site politics.ie started a thread on the subject.
One of the more polite comments read: “Cowen sounds like he had a very late night. Very tetchy. A bit confused. Awful.”
These were the first sparks in a bush fire that showed how much the rules of media engagement are changing, fuelled by the increasing power of online social media and the remarkable speed with which information is now sent around the world.
It is estimated that up to 100,000 Irish people are now signed up to the microblogging site Twitter, although it is unclear how many of these are active participants in the service, which functions as a tool for both conversations and mini-broadcasts published instantaneously for public consumption. In Ireland, some users have several thousand followers, each of whom in turn may have hundreds more. While much of the conversation revolves around ephemera or personal chats, there is a hard core of users who use the service to analyse and dissect Irish politics through commenting on programmes such as Morning Ireland, Prime Timeand Tonight with Vincent Browne.
So when Simon Coveney wrote at 9.16am that the Taoiseach “sounded half way between drunk and hung-over”, he was stepping into a conversation which was already well under way, as numerous users speculated about the reasons for Cowen’s poor performance. That this particular tweet came from a Fine Gael frontbench spokesman allowed traditional news outlets to enter the fray. Shortly after 10am, Pat Kenny read out Coveney’s tweet live on air. About 15 minutes later, TV3’s Ursula Halligan put it to the Taoiseach that “radio and the internet were alive with the belief” that he had been drunk or hung-over.
The Taoiseach’s rebuttal of Halligan’s questions, in turn, allowed other media to develop the story further. By 11.30am, rte.ie, irishtimes.com and other websites were reporting it on those terms. The BBC quickly followed suit, publishing it on the Northern Ireland section of its website. And by noon, the international newswire services – Reuters, PA and AP – were picking it up and syndicating it to media clients around the world.
In the US, where early morning newsrooms would have been just coming to life, the headline “Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen denies being drunk in radio interview” would have seemed an attractive titbit for their breakfast-time schedules. The story appeared on some of the world’s most visited websites, including the New York Times website, Fox News and the Huffington Post.
In the vast majority of cases, the original wire stories were published verbatim, with little or no alteration or analysis. But the Wall Street Journal’s Ireland correspondent commented that: “Even assuming that he was simply tired and unprepared, the timing of this interview couldn’t be worse. His Government and the Central Bank of Ireland are currently embroiled in the task of coming up with a final figure for the split and eventual wind-down of nationalised Anglo Irish Bank Corp. The bailout is expected to exceed €25 billion.”
By lunchtime, when senior Ministers were sent out to defend Cowen on the lunchtime news bulletins, the story had already gone global. In barely four hours, a conversation in a Galway hotel was being reported from Boston to Beijing. Back home, the story was moving on, as online users linked to other examples of below-par radio performances by Cowen posted on YouTube and broadcasters and newspapers were putting together extensive packages on the events of the day (and the preceding night). It was, by any measure, an unmitigated public relations catastrophe.
Media analyst Stephen O’Leary examined coverage of the story from over 128,000 news sources in over 200 countries. Over the 15 hours following the interview, he calculates, 457 articles were published in 26 countries. Of these, 108 were in Ireland, 197 in the US and 51 in the UK. The story was also published across all of western Europe, in China, India and Australia.
According to O’Leary, the coverage represented a 692 per cent increase on the average daily coverage for the Taoiseach over the preceding five days. He argues Irish political parties in general and Fianna Fáil in particular have failed to understand the benefits and pitfalls of social media.
“That the Taoiseach could be unaware of an incendiary tweet from a member of the Opposition frontbench indicates that Fianna Fáil does not monitor social media,” he says.
[ http://olearyanalytics.com/the-brian-cowen-interview-the-global-media-response/ ]