While traditional media has proved it still has the power to whip up a moral panic about alcohol-fuelled violence, digital media now provides a space for the facts, writes Paul Karp.

The divided community response to NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell's proposed new restrictions on licensed venues and other measures targeting alcohol-fuelled violence was not just a function of people's drinking habits.

That was definitely a part of it: outrage on one side (generally) from twenty- and thirty-somethings who know you don't have to be a violent lout to want a drink at 3am, and who felt the laws curtailed their liberty; on the other, from respectable citizens and concerned parents (and therefore mainly over-forties) who felt a crackdown of other people's drinking was permissible to protect their kids.

The other major fault-line on the issue was the source of citizens' information on the subject; the media rather than the drinks they consume. Broadly speaking, division over the new laws maps the digital news divide: digital media, including Twitter, were broadly against the laws; more traditional media were more likely to be in favour.

Traditional media - the 6pm news and major newspapers - were doing their best to make the concerned citizens very scared and demand that O'Farrell do something. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Daily Telegraph both ran high-profile campaigns. They consistently blasted O'Farrell for bucking under pressure, as he made the case for liberty (that alcohol consumption is a matter of individual responsibility) and said commonsense things (a 1:30am lockout could not be expected to stop assaults that occurred at 9pm).

The evening news was a strong influence as well. There are only so many times a parent can see footage of police breaking up scuffles on George St and ambulances on-scene to pump their sons' or daughters' stomachs before they too demand that something be done.

But the story was very different on the other side of the digital divide. On the Guardian Australia's website, the story was that the number of alcohol-related assaults in New South Wales has been declining since 2008 and is the lowest since 2002, including in the Sydney local government area. Bloggers like Richard Farmer on politicalowl analysed Australian Bureau of Statistics figures that show deaths from assault using bodily force in NSW are down. Crikey more pointedly gave traditional media a serve: 'Where the Tele and the SMH agree: violence and media beat-ups'. Another angle on the story was that as alcohol-related violence decreased, other categories were on the rise, particularly domestic violence.

Social media was the way most people shared and learned about this information which flew in the face of the dominant media narrative. In the week leading up to O'Farrell's kneejerk reaction, many digital journos like Bernard Keane took to Twitter to link articles and graphs charting the decline of alcohol-related violence. Blogs like Left Flank were quick to describe legal challenges as artificial "moral panic".

Traditional media reported the crime stats too. The SMH labelled them "confusing" - a nod to the fact the data contradicted the moral panic the paper was whipping up, but no real attempt to resolve that cognitive dissonance was made. It reported that King's Cross was defying the state trend because over certain time periods assaults were stable. With no increase to report, now the fact that crime didn't decrease would have to be enough to justify the scare campaign.

To anyone on the digital news side of the divide, O'Farrell's backflip was cowardly and ill-informed. Just at the point we reached a common understanding that alcohol-related violence was down and Sydney was not going to hell in a hand-basket, O'Farrell appears to have decided to ignore evidence-based policymaking and cave to well-motivated but generally misinformed neo-prohibitionism. To everyone else, there was relief someone had finally done something.

I sent the crime data to a concerned loved one. Their response was "OK, but still," reflecting an attitude that the crackdown is still justified because any violence is too much. True, but we still need the right information. No rational evaluation of whether it is worth giving up certain freedoms can be made without evidence of the size of the problem. And I suspect for most people it is just too hard to unlearn impressions left by traditional media, so better to hear the facts first and form impressions later.

What this indicates is that traditional media still has power. The tabloid campaign formula worked.

It also suggested that the medium can affect the message. Just as video footage of alcohol-related violence and arrests is a staple of television news, graphs and data analysis are a common feature of blogs and digital news, which generally has a more specialist or wonkish audience. Digital news sources set themselves up in opposition to traditional media, which explains the enthusiasm for reactionary angles and stories that stress the counterintuitive line that alcohol-related violence is not a (worsening) problem. And digital news sources know they are targeting a younger audience who want to be armed with the information to fight legislative overreach - so perhaps it is about our drinking patterns after all.

What is clear is that with the rise of digital and social media, eventually the old media will be less able to create one dominant narrative, because a multitude of sources can leap in with the counterintuitive angle or information. For traditional media, it may be that the call for last drinks comes sooner than you think.

Paul Karp is an industrial relations journalist at Thomson Reuters. Find him on Twitter @Paul_Karp. View his full profile here.