Twitter casts new light on blanket royal baby coverage

NBC presenter Natalie Morales knits baby booties opposite St Mary's Hospital as the media waits for the royal birth. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

Twitter added something quite new to the royal learning curve. We already knew many of the lessons on offer last week. That 14-and-a-half hours of waiting for nothing remotely visual to happen outside a hospital on Britain's hottest day seemed like a hardship posting for 90 or so TV crews and at least 150 photographers. That the hours of nothing to say have to be filled by saying something asinine. That expecting Sophie Raworth (two daughters, one son), Julie Etchingham (two sons) or Kate Silverton (one daughter) to simulate ecstasy over this miracle child flies in the face of experience or reality. That all newborn babies look much the same. Aahh! That recent mums have a residual bump. And that the Guardian website's special home page ? press Royalist to get the whole works and Republican to see it vanish in a trice ? was a demonstration of digital gymnastics scary enough to make David Cameron drool.

Yet it was the tweets that told the underlying story. The Mail and Telegraph are keen on leftwing conspiracies: no, not just in the Indy or Guardian, but amid the tentacles enfolding the BBC. All life, it seems, is warped to a hidden agenda. But Twitter, through the wastelands of waiting, told a parallel story. Were the reporters and columnists from papers and news organisations right, left or centre displaying genuine fascination with unfolding events, or were they just groaning sotto voce? Was the excitement that filled US news-channel screens fact or confected fiction? Frankly, my dear, did anyone give a damn ? except the millions of readers, viewers and unique visitors out there who, it was variously assumed, displayed rapt attention? Could this ? as the BBC put it ? really be "the people's pregnancy"?

Of course, in a way, there are moments of history here. Hail the future King George (86 when the next millennium dawns). Strike a few more peripheral royals off the civil list. Watch opinion polls squeeze the republican vote still further, at least for a while. But if I were sitting in Buckingham Palace pondering the future, I wouldn't be worrying much over any of these things: rather, uneasily, the perception that when push came to gush, the media was delivering a battle of bitten lips. Here were columnists for Tory papers making bad jokes about hard Labour. Here was a sweaty BBC presenter groaning that "nothing's going to happen". It was routine royal business as usual from London to LA.

And the question for journalists to ask themselves is a nagging one. Do we jump through all these hoops, fill all these hours, churn out of all these supplements, because our audience is enthralled ? or because we merely suppose they're enthralled?

Somehow 2.8% of the viewing population watching BBC News (not to mention 1.6% of the Sky News legions) through the longest day doesn't quite hit that spot. Somehow 50,000 extra copies of The Times as stowaway souvenirs doesn't do it either. Perhaps too many punters were on the phone to YouGov at the time, defining how interested they were in this amazing baby. Answer: not very, 29%; not at all, 24%; don't know, 2%.

Of course it all surged up later, when there were swaddling clothes there to see. Of course the blogosphere staged its predictable explosion. Of course two obviously cheery young marrieds had something pleasant to celebrate. And of course some millions of Brits and others round the globe wished to celebrate with them. A happy event. But this blanket of media cynicism and boredom that suffocates such simple feeling? An enthusiasm fuelled by audience figures alone? Portent because it's expected, not felt? Alas, that's nothing to feel happy about.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/jul/28/twitter-blanket-royal-baby-coverage

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