The shock of the old

IT WAS supposed to be the new-media election. E-mail, blogging, social networking and tweeting were expected to surge in importance and perhaps to decide the race. Something else has happened. Britain's first television debate, on April 15th, was followed by a ten-point swing to the Liberal Democrats. The debate and its aftermath dominated political news for several days and has transformed the race. It is a triumph for old media.

There were signs even before the debate that new media were not living up to expectations. A survey carried out during the first week in April by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts found that 79% of Britons could not recall seeing any online electioneering—not even an e-mail. The outfit concluded that politicians were failing to take advantage of new media's huge potential to engage with voters. Perhaps. Or perhaps this is to confuse novelty with importance. For several reasons, traditional media are rather good at delivering political messages.

The first television debate, on ITV, was watched by 9.4m Britons. That works out to 37% of the prime-time audience—better than the share of Americans who watched the first round between John McCain and Barack Obama in 2008. The second debate, scheduled for broadcast on Sky News on April 22nd, may draw fewer viewers. Although almost everyone in Britain has access to Sky News, it is often buried deep in the programme guide. But the debate is nonetheless likely to hog the headlines for days afterwards.

Television is the only technology that can reach so many people in a single day. But others are not far behind. Although their circulation has declined, newspapers still reach large audiences. The Sun, which supports the Conservatives, is read by 8m people each day. By comparison, much-touted social media like Twitter are so niche as to be almost invisible. Get Elected, a political-research outfit, has examined 100 tight races, where online campaigning should presumably be fierce. It found that only 45% of the candidates in those races had Twitter accounts. The politicians who used it attracted an average of just 614 followers. The average English constituency contains 70,000 people.

And old media take up a big proportion of people's leisure time. Each televised debate lasts for 90 minutes. The average reader spends 40 minutes with his daily newspaper and an hour with the Saturday and Sunday papers. It takes just seconds to read an e-mail or a politician's tweet. One must make some heroic assumptions about the appeal of digital media to think they influence people as much as traditional outlets.

Unlike the internet, newspapers and television tilt towards the old. Fully 47% of the audience for the first debate was aged 55 or older. Some 36% of the Daily Mail's readers, and 41% of the Daily Telegraph's, are aged 65 or older, according to the National Readership Survey. Advertisers are less keen to reach the old than the young, which is one reason newspapers are losing money. But an aged audience is precisely what politicians want. The old are much more likely to vote than the young.

Of course, the television debates have been refracted through tweets and e-mails, just as they have been dissected by newspapers. New media are handy for firing up committed supporters, too. But when it comes to reaching the voters who matter, the old technologies are still the best.