Michael Moore, GLW have the political ear of youth

Michael Moore, GLW have the political ear of youth: "If you were listening to the Australia Talks Back program on ABC Radio National on July 7, you would have heard Tessa Court, from the web monitoring company Hitwise, say: "If you look at the top websites that Australians visited just last week, Michael Moore was the number one, you know, global site that they went to. The second one was the Green Left Weekly which has a huge proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds."

A feature article by Jacqueline Maley in the July 2 Sydney Morning Herald noted GLW's lead. After claiming that “Australia's next government could be decided in cyberspace, where more Australians are heading for their fix of politics”, Maley observed: “Last week, the most visited Australian political website was that of Green Left Weekly, the sister site to the far-left newspaper. For such small, alternative opinion-makers, the internet represents a level playing field...”

Maley went on to identify the internet as the place where an increasing proportion of young people get their politics. She wrote: “John Croll, the chief executive officer of the media analysts Media Monitors, believes these renegade sites could represent a threat to politics' big players. `They are a great risk for political parties because they don't know what's being said about them, unless they have internet monitoring', he says."


Peter Boyle