Been absent far too long from my alma mater at Daily Kos. But since some elements are inspired by US campaigning (and my journalism was inspired by first writing here) I though I might just update y'all with snippets of my just published article about the battle between social media in the UK, and our now rabid right wing press.
For various reasons I've outlined before, it's been the most rabidly partisan election for the British press for many years. 80% of Fleet Street have come out in favour of the ruling Conservatives or their coalition
The fact is that, after the exposure of Murdoch and the hacking scandal, and the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics and culture, the bulk of the British Press has doubled down in an anti Labour campaign, because the leader Ed Miliband has promised to look at the heavy concentration of ownership. More on that in another piece here.
Three Way Gunfight in the Last Chance Saloon.
Meanwhile back to social media.
Twitter, Facebook, blogs and chat forums are just peer to peer publishing platforms. But compared to the mainstream press, they can perform an immediate crowd-sourced rebuttal unit. Online there are thousands of potential voluntary fact checkers, photographers, spin-meisters, satirists, pundits and witnesses.
In the last week alone I've seen them perform three crucial functions in holding our heavily monopolised media corporations to account.
Just one example of many to amuse you about our meritocratic system
The next day an anonymous online contributor also revealed that a Financial Times endorsement of Cameron and the Coalition - which took Ed Miliband to task for being too "preoccupied by inequality" - was written by Jonathan Ford, pictured below as a member of Oxford University's hyper-elite Bullingdon club with David Cameron and his rival for the leadership Boris Johnson.
Bullingdon Club 80s Cameron second top left. Boris Johnson third bottom left
Finally a closing section more relevant to the US
The Ground War Looms
Yet all these sorties and shoot outs in the air war will only make this the proper first 'social media' election if they are reflected in the votes cast this coming Thursday.
It's the ground war, the getting out of the vote, which will determine the outcome of the general election now.
There is some sign that social media has played a role in that too. The comedian Russell Brand, who is followed by 10 million people on Twitter, and has a much watched news channel on YouTube, The Trews, was the broadcasting sensation of this election as he dropped his well-rehearsed opposition to endorse Ed Miliband as Prime Minster.
"It's gotta be Labour," he said in a video released on Monday lunchtime. (Though he endorsed the Green candidate in Brighton and suggested voters in Scotland should form a different view).
Brand's reach is phenomenal and Miliband was the only leader of a major political party to give him an interview. Though David Cameron, the Daily Mail and the Sun branded the Labour leader a 'joke' for talking to the comedian-cum-activist, the first half of the interview, broadcast last week, has already been viewed half a million times.
Within ten hours the surprise endorsement had been viewed a quarter of a million times.
Brand only backed Miliband because of his acceptance of 'power from below' and activism. But the endorsement will come too late for many non-voters. Registration to vote closed two weeks ago.
However thanks to an online facility (suggest by Labour's Tom Watson when he was minister) the ability to register has never been easier. And there was a massive spike in registrations, 500,000 alone in the last few days, mainly of those under 30 who are most likely to vote against the Coalition partners.
So if Thursday's vote has any surprises it could be down to this factor of the ground game - a factor that would have passed by most the polling companies and their samples based on previous elections. Certainly, most experts say that Labour has the best 'ground game' so far, with far more 'voter contacts' than most of the other parties, even in Scotland.
If this turns into more Labour votes (and I make no predictions) then the real online masterstroke of this election would be something that David Axelrod, who is working with the Miliband campaign team, promoted during the Obama campaign in 2008.
Axelrod's underlying strategy has always been this. Register more voters. Then engage them in campaigns to register yet more and get out the vote. In the 2008 US Presidential campaign, the strategy of youth engagement social media played a vital part.