taffboy gwyrdd said:
...Anyways, having made this decision much pursuaded it seems at the idea that this would make us more media friendly I have poked around the websites and news bulletins.
Of the Graun, Indie and BBC websites there is a mention on the beeb site alone quite low down in the UK news section.
No radio bulletin has announced this great decision.
Give it time.
taffboy gwyrdd said:
I said during the campaign that we aint ignored because we dont have a leader, it's because our policies aint corpo-friendly, our philosophy is too deep for soundbites and we dont have the £££ for a big machine.
I hope I was wrong, I suspect I was right.
It's probably a mix of both Taffboy, it is harder for the media to cover a political organisation that doesn't have a 'leader'.
E.g. with the other political parties, if Cameron or... erm, whoever for the LibDems criticises government policy, it's more likely to be taken up and reported prominently by the media than if some shadow minister or backbencher has a go. There's a hierarchy with the parties, i.e. Conservative criticism of Labour government is treated as more important than criticism coming from LibDems, Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru or whoever, because Conservative party is the official opposition, the others in comparison are minor players.
So it's not just the message, but the source of the message that dictates where it features on the news agenda when editors are deciding what to cover, and how (i.e. short read to camera or a full package prepared in house or a full monty reporter on the scene, lives to camera) and for how long.
Again, if you have Cameron criticising the government, or a shadow minister or a backbencher, Cameron is more likely to be covered than the others.
The Greens have presented a problem in that respect, where media coverage is concerned, without a single recognised leader, it's can be too difficult to provide the kind of coverage the story warrants.
i.e. Cameron criticises government policy, it's likely to be biggish news, the editor's decided the story warrants a couple of minutes of airtime, the story starts: Leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron criticises Gordon Brown's latest policy announcement... blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.
Green party criticises government policy, or Alex Salmond's SNP or George Galloway's Respect, well, they're minor parties, they don't warrant the same amount of airtime. The story needs to be said in soundbites.
How do you report Green party criticism of government policy with the pre-existing Green party leadership set up in a 30-45 second story?
You start the story: Sian Whatsername, one of the Green Party's two co-speakers, has today been criticising Gordon Brown's latest policy announcement.
You can't do that in a general news bulletin watched by a general audience as opposed to politics anoraks. You'd get away with it in one of the weekend political lunchtime shows, or Newsnight, or Channel 4 News, but the Six on the BBC? Unlikely. The journalist and the editor know that the audience at home is going to be sitting on their sofa and thinking: "Huh?" Co-speaker? What's that then? Why isn't their leader criticising Gordon Brown? Who is their leader? Your average Joe Bloggs thinks all political parties have a leader. Your average Joe Bloggs wants all political parties to have a distinct, identifiable leader (more on that later).
In terms of news coverage, in the news agenda, Green party pronouncements aren't as important as the official oppositions thoughts. You're going to get less airtime. If you're going to get less airtime, the message needs to be easily conveyable in that briefer airtime. That isn't possible when you have a political party who's leadership -- or rather non-leadership hierarchy/unconventional co-speaker system -- needs a good minute to explain to the audience.
If a journalist has 30-45 seconds to tell a story, but it takes a minute to explain Sian whatsername is a co-speaker (which means effectively one of two 'leaders' of the Green party, because the Green party doesn't have a leader, it has two co-speakers of equal importance who share power in the party)... oops! time out... you've run out of time to actually tell people the actual message that you're trying to convey...
The upshot of that is that an editor is not going to say, actually, this minor story (in terms of the news agenda) can't be told in 30-45 seconds, so we're going to bump it up, give it two minutes, because we're going to need to explain this whole co-speaker thing... the reality is that the story will be considered and then dropped due to time considerations, or the editor will already have had those factors in mind and wouldn't have considered covering it, because they know it can't be done in the journalistic timescale (less important story = less airtime) the story warrants.
It really is a factor.
) I think it will be very difficult to defeat Caroline Lucas, and as Matt says she is already de facto "leader". All said and done, she is on the centre left of the party, so it is easier to live with than Darren Johnson anyway. Johnson is the one who will need to be defeated - for Deputy - if the left profile of the party is to be maintained (his progressive stance on Ian Blair notwithstanding)
