Larvatus Prodeo

Having talked to a few friends over the last few days who aren’t political junkies (but are more taken with politics than perhaps the average voter), I’m not at all convinced that the Liberal leadership shenanigans are of anywhere near the same interest to most folks as they are to those of us who’ve been as transfixed as we become during election campaigns. I’ve already commented that there’s a strange forgetting (or perhaps a return to the default truth) among political journalists that politics – and the nation which will be confronting climate change – exists outside a few rooms in Canberra.

Similarly, we’ve seen a classic case of the calling into being of a phantom public in all the emails and texts sent to Liberal MPs – polarised between categories (“denialists”, etc) which hardly have any resonance in most Australians’ vocabularies or lived experience. Yet it’s taken for reality, and it seemingly has had a real effect in that alternative universe that is the Liberal Parliamentary Party.

So what of the role of the media in all this?

Continue reading ‘The media, social media and the Liberal thrills and spills’