Social media has changed how we get the news and politicians are capitalising on it

When a delegation of "influencers" appeared at Canberra's budget lock-up this year, joining press gallery journalists in the increasingly arcane tradition of reading a complex document for a few quiet hours before bursting forth in analysis thereof, much comment was made.

The influencers were mainly young and female, so the tree of comedic response fairly groaned with low-hanging dad jokes about line items for mascara, or budget analysis confirming the return of flares.

Pulsing beneath the chorus of haw-haws were serious questions. Social media influencers make their money by charging companies money to access their significant online communities. They're different from journalists. How would their commentary sit alongside the work of political journalists with more experience and a stated commitment to impartiality?

Abbie Chatfield is a former reality TV star whose podcast It's A Lot and social media accounts on Instagram and TikTok garner — collectively — well north of a million followers. She was invited to the budget lock-up, but did not attend, and confirms she was not offered payment.

"Maybe I would have been there if I was offered money. I don't know, what am I going to get, 40 bucks of petrol to Canberra? I love you, Canberra, but I don't think anyone is going, oh, yeah, I'm going to disrupt my work week to go to Canberra because I'm dying to stay in a four-star hotel, in the middle of Canberra, just for funsies. I don't know, it isn't like they're doing it in Fiji, like, Jesus."

Chatfield did devote a podcast episode to the budget, focusing on the treasurer's announcement that the government planned to ban non-compete clauses for all but high-paid employees. She says she is clear about her political views (a Greens voter, she declared that she would do anything she could to prevent Peter Dutton becoming prime minister) but is careful not to overload her feed with politics.

"I do MAFS recaps, I do blow job tips, I interview the prime minister," Chatfield says. "You know, it's a spectrum. So, I think that if I'm doing politics, politics, politics, politics, people will tune out."

Chatfield agrees that she is an "influencer".

"But I do think it can be used as an insult, which I don't love because historically, whenever women dominate in fields — which influencing is, influencing is dominated by women — it tends to be attacked as silly, meaningless, frivolous, unimportant and when men do the same thing, they're seen as entrepreneurial and interesting and 'Well, can you believe he has a podcast microphone'."

When radio broadcaster John Laws died last Sunday at the age of 90, obituarists agreed that his professional life had been one of significant political power.

Nobody uses the term "influencer" about Laws or his cohort of successors; Chatfield is correct that the term is largely reserved for women and carries an unmistakably pejorative whiff.

But what is the difference? Like Chatfield, Laws did not describe himself as a journalist but held forth stridently on political issues. Like Chatfield, his power derived from the size of his personal following. And like Chatfield, famously, he was not above charging companies for a warm introduction to his army of fans. Their audience demographics are — obviously — different. But the model is the same.

"Maybe we are some of the original influencers," says Ben Fordham, Sydney's top-rating breakfast presenter at 2GB.

"We're certainly, as radio hosts, the original form of social media. I mean, you have a look at talkback — talkback gave the average person the chance to get on the air and say what they think. Now everyone's able to do that through a million different apps. So yeah, maybe we are influencers in a way. I'm a trained journalist, but I'm also a commentator when I'm on air. I try to wherever I can make it clear, when I'm reporting a news story and when I'm doing an editorial."

Fordham walks a complex path in politics. He interviews politicians on-air and maintains relationships with them off-air, which can extend to advocacy. He once sought a meeting with prime minister Tony Abbott to advocate for same-sex marriage ("I said, well, you're going to end up paying the ultimate price, you know it's happening, right, it's happening, it's going to happen. So why not just be the person who helps facilitate it? But he thought it was like a bad joke. I was deadly serious, so I remember having to say to him, Tony, I'm serious.")

He met with prime minister Anthony Albanese at Kirribilli, urging him to abandon the Voice referendum and simply legislate the proposed body instead ("I just said, look, I've got Aboriginal mates, you've got Aboriginal mates, this is going to be a complete and utter f***-up the day after this thing goes down. Save it now and change the approach.").

Neither of these sallies worked. And Fordham's stance in support of same-sex marriage caused him significant grief among his listenership. The business of growing and maintaining a commercially lucrative audience in an increasingly contestable field is not an easy one.

The media inside the House

Radio is now considered a legacy medium. But 80 years ago, radio itself was the disrupter.

The appointment of Warren Denning as the ABC's first radio correspondent to the federal parliamentary press gallery — hitherto composed only of newspapermen — was explosively controversial.

The pressmen and their proprietors were aghast that Denning would be able to go straight to air with news that their readers — thanks to the laborious and clanking elements of the hot-metal printing system — had to wait until tomorrow morning to receive.

In his history of the press gallery the ABC's Nick Haggarty records that the pressmen fought hard to maintain their exclusive access to the prime minister.

"On the insistence of the newspaper journalists, when Sir Robert Menzies first became prime minister in 1939 he held two press conferences a day, back to back — one for the newspapers and the other for Denning, as the print reporters didn't want the radio reporter sharing in their information," Haggarty writes.

Unbelievably, Menzies kept up the practice for six whole weeks; the pressmen stopped insisting on it once they realised that Denning was extracting significant benefits from his daily exclusive with the PM.

Menzies's deference to their wishes, however, says something important about the mutually dependent relationship between the political leaders of Australia and the embedded journalists capable of conveying their sentiments to the vast continent's sparse and scattered population.

"Unlike in any other Western democracy, Australia's press gallery has always been housed in the same building as the politicians," writes Haggarty, adding that technological disruption has been a constant theme in the gallery's history.

Indeed, the disruption of the media environment this century makes the concerns of the gallery reporters in 1939 look rather trivial. The once-closed shop is gone for ever.

The 2025 election has been called "the influencers' election". It coincided, according to the University of Canberra's annual Digital News Report, with a significant national tipping point. For the first time, more Australians (26 per cent) said they get their news from social media platforms than from legacy news media sites (23 per cent).

During the campaign, politicians pumped out their own material on social media sites and carved out time for interviews on popular podcasts.

Political ads farmed out by the major political parties across various social media platforms saw the obligatory "authorised by" tags appended to an escalatingly baffling array of content. An AI "diss track", Italian brainrot, copious memes; all calculated to appeal to certain online demographics while puzzling others.

YouTube's most-watched election interview with Anthony Albanese, says tech specialist and Crikey associate editor Cam Wilson, wasn't with a political reporter — it was with Ozzy Man Reviews, the cult Australian YouTuber with six million subscribers.

"Ozzy Man Reviews has this ocker bogan character, and his content is mostly kind of commentary over viral clips of things like Australian wildlife doing crazy things," says Wilson.

The content creator is based in WA and was contacted by Albanese's media team via Instagram during the campaign in advance of a visit by the PM to Perth.

The pair arranged to meet in a pub for a filmed chat.

"The difference between politicians doing interviews with traditional media and the online creators who have their own audience is that politicians are trying to tap into this direct relationship that people have with the people that they see in their phone," says Wilson.

"When you appear on someone else's podcast or YouTube channel, in effect what's happening is the persons whose property that you are going to, they are vouching for you. It's like being introduced to a friend, by a friend."

Remaking the media

The migration of audiences from legacy media businesses to social media platforms is a development this century that has been, at once, incredibly swift and incredibly disruptive. It has smashed old assumptions about the way we communicate with each other as humans.

For politicians and campaigners, it means spending more and more time crafting bespoke messages for clumps of voters gathered to talk about other things — sport, or crafting, or true crime.

For legacy media organisations, once the wielders of significant sway owing to their proprietors' investment of serious money into printing plants or TV networks, it means the ignominy of losing audience share to content creators running businesses on their phones.

Political journalists and politicians — once parties to a co-dependent relationship negotiated spikily in the airlocked corridors of Parliament House — now find a new, grim commonality.

Both now battle for eyeballs and attention — measured by the second — on social media platforms whose owners are based far from Canberra. Who resist regulation as far as is strategically possible. Whose algorithms parcel up and direct audience attention using a recipe that is not available for public review. And who wield inordinate political power — well beyond that of the "old moguls" who bought their ink by the barrel.

Jonathan Swan, White House reporter for the New York Times, says that for reality TV star-turned-president Donald Trump, the blurring of politics and entertainment is instinctive.

"If you just look at the dais for Trump's inauguration, it was the masters of the attentional universe right there sitting on the dais," he says.

"It was Sundar Pichai of Google, it was Zuckerberg, you know, it was Bezos, it was Musk, and Trump understands that these platforms control and shape what people think, so — you know — it's a mutually beneficial relationship."

Australian politicians can't ignore anyone

In Australia, there is a specific reason why politicians are obliged to fan out to every available platform in pursuit of voters, even the ones who are expressly uninterested in hearing from them.

For a century now, voting in Australia has been compulsory, enforced by a fine. In rare instances, we will jail someone for refusing to pay the fine, like Victorian woman Melissa Manson, who failed to vote in the 1993 and 1996 elections on the grounds that none of the candidates deserved her vote. Refusing to pay the fines, she was jailed for one day in 1999.

Compulsory voting is rare. None of the democracies with which we share design commonalities — the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand — obliges citizens to vote.

For most ordinary Australians, it means that voting is a near-automatic part of life.

For politicians and campaigners, the consequence is acute: They cannot afford to ignore anyone. Not the poor, not the sick, not the aged or infirm. Not even the bored, the disinclined, or the actively hostile. The vast majority — 90 per cent, at the 2025 election — will show up to vote. The challenge is getting to them and winning them over before they do.

Compulsory voting means that — unlike in the US — parties don't need to anger or scare voters to get them off the couch and into a polling station. It means that elections are fought in the centre, not at the extremes.

But here's where the changing media environment creates an escalating degree of friction in our democratic system.

While compulsory voting rewards moderation, the Attention Olympics staged every day on the hot oblong field of our smartphones rewards the exact opposite.

Says Waleed Aly, who is a politics lecturer at Monash University and a writer, thinker, podcaster and Gold Logie-winning TV host: "We have this contradiction in Australia between a news information environment that is polarising and a political system that is, let's call it unifying, or perhaps 'moderating' is a better word.

"And what that means is that actually, the imperatives of media outlets, but more broadly content makers, are at odds with the imperatives of politicians, at least in the short term. To put it really simply, the politicians need to win the centre. The media outlets don't usually win by being in the centre because they are not in a compulsory voting environment. They are in a voluntary voting environment, and so the polarisation generates the audience they win by whipping up the base. 

"Not all of them do it, it's more complicated than that. And we are certainly not America; our media is nowhere near as polarised as you see there, and our politics isn't, because of compulsory voting. But the dynamic is there."

How information was set free

Western democracy — in particular, the British system from which Australia drew half of our parliamentary design at Federation — describes a long arc towards the democratisation of information.

The arrival of the printing press — a new and cheap way of circulating information to the masses — posed an extraordinary challenge to the holders of institutional power.

In 1536, William Tyndale was hanged — and his body burned — for the offence of translating the Bible into English, an act which threatened the power of the Latin-reading clergy.

Two years later, Henry VIII banned all publications that were not directly approved by his Privy Council.

But by the 1600s the popular press of Britain was nonetheless off and running. It was cheap to print newspapers, and hundreds sprang up in London. Political campaigners ran off pamphlets spreading lies about each other. A series of pornographic news titles emerged, combining dubious items of news with dirty jokes. Britain was drowning in a sea of cheap, tawdry, unreliable content. Utter chaos. So in 1662, the exiled King Charles II returned to Britain and installed the Printing Act, which decreed that only a handful of approved printers were licensed to operate. Seditious or treasonous material was banned. And the reporting of parliamentary debates was banned too.

Chaos gave way to censorship. The settled government view at the time was that voters had no business knowing how their elected members arrived at decisions. One publication came up with a genius workaround. The Gentlemen's Magazine — whose staff included a lowly journalist called Samuel Johnson, later to become one of the immortal greats of the English language — started publishing a column called "Debates In The Senate Of Lilliput". Basically, they just changed the names and pretended it was all fiction and got away with it. Readers were in on the joke, and they loved it. Johnson thus became one of the first parliamentary sketch writers, a tradition that persists to this day.

The reporting ban was repealed by the time Britain colonised Australia, and the goings-on of our Commonwealth Parliament have always been reportable.

But for most of our history, reporting politics has been something of a closed shop, practised by accredited holders of parliamentary press passes, and communicated to predictable, established audiences who gathered in the same places to read or hear about decisions being made in their names.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd says Australian democracy has been through multiple phases of communication, beginning with mass rallies in the Federation's early days.

"Then newspapers become more dominant — and therefore their proprietors and their editors — but then the age of radio and television and … the mass media which became of overwhelming importance, through to the current age which is the destruction of those media models and the creation of a thousand different media platforms, but without any common — what I would describe as 'fact base'. Which is the essential difficulty."

Waleed Aly says the disappearance of common places — where large audiences are focused on the same set of facts or questions at the same time — has its own consequence for democracy.

"Each individual now can curate for themselves their intake and what that means is that no one's curation will be the same as someone else's," he says.

"Now, that sounds like an individualist utopia. I get the things that are relevant to me — right down to the ads that I receive — whether I want to ask how that happens or not. But then what starts to happen — and I think this is an issue for democracy — is that it becomes very difficult for things to be in common. Democracy is a thing that only exists in common. Without the 'in common', without the public, you're not really talking about democracy. You're talking about something that's slightly different."

Former prime minister Tony Abbott says that the 24/7 media cycle and the rise of social media has "coarsened our public discourse".

"I think that's made it harder and harder for clear, rational, principled voices to be heard. There's just so much more static, than ever before."

But Abbott says the answer does not lie in "railing against the system" or attempting to regulate media more heavily.

"I just think we need better people and stronger characters in our public life, and we need better people and stronger characters in the media."

Stream all episodes of Annabel Crabb's Civic Duty free on ABC iview.