The modern election campaign and mobile phone blackspots

There is something vaguely comical about holding a campaign event in a mobile phone black-spot. If a tree falls in the forest and no-one hears it did it actually happen ?

More than any other even this week the decision by Tony Abbott's campaign team to launch new funding for mobile black spots in a telecommunications dead zone in the Blue Mountains underlined the nature of modern elections.

If people wonder why this campaign seems so disjointed, so lacking in any meaningful themes or visions, it is because of the way campaigns are now covered.

Tweet it. Blog it. Post it. Snap it. Film it.

It is all about the moment. The images are everything.

Capturing it now. Capturing fast. And then moving on.

Print journalists are along for the ride. It is about the images for the web and the nightly news.

Coalition campaign planners must have realised there would be a problem with holding an event in a mobile phone dead zone. But they must have decided the natural beauty of the area and the policy itself demanded the location.

Even so, it was a misstep. From the moment the TV crews found out about the location when boarding the plane to Sydney, all hell broke loose. These guys don't let anything stand in their way, particularly at a press conference, to get the press shots.  And they don't hold back when they are unhappy. They surrounded an Abbott media advisor seeking answers.

The ABC were quick enough to be able to get a satellite truck out to the venue at Colo Heights but others weren't quite so nimble. 

As a result, at the venue, barring up gained a whole new meaning.

But journalists and camera crews wildly waved their phones in the air to little avail.

It was only as the bus was pulling back into Windsor in the west of Sydney that the Abbott crew realised they had a problem. Vision of the event had only showed on ABC 24. Commercial channels were still waiting to stream the vision to their newsrooms and had missed morning newsbreaks.

There was now a risk the airing of the vision would overlap with the next event.

It was a rare slip-up for the well planned Abbott campaign team.