The March of the Bloggers

The headline above says it all. Featured in the Times yesterday, columnist Simon Jenkins admitted that he had been a little slow on the uptake but as his article reveals: it has finally dawned on him that mass communications are no longer the exclusive property of governments or moneyed oligarchs, like Times owner Rupert Murdoch. For better or for worse, the Internet opens the doors for everyone.

Despite this realisation however, the columnist still remains somewhat aloof toward the Internet. “On the web,” he writes, “opinion travels first class while facts go steerage.”

As if newspapers were paragons of objectivity and even-handedness.

They are not and that fact is being clearly and graphically underlined by the Internet. The Times, like all the other major newspapers, has yet to even mention – let alone publish – Richard Tomlinson’s historic affidavit on the death of Princess Diana. If it were not for the Internet we would still not be any wiser as to the real circumstances behind Diana's death and that's with no thanks to the likes of Simon Jenkins.

The mainstream media is under threat precisely because it has failed to report events fairly, accurately and objectively. Instead it is being used to direct and massage public perception on behalf of the authorities and the media owning oligarchs. An example of this being the numerous stories of Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction which were a media mainstay in the years and months prior to the actual invasion of Iraq. In its aftermath they proved to be utterly baseless but they had suitably prepared public sentiment in both Britain and America into accepting the invasion, even if somewhat reluctantly.

As a result, there is growing disenchantment with the media and not just the print media. There is indeed something of a media revolution going on and even TV veiwing figures are starting to fall. Although don't expect Jenkins to tell you about that yet, he's only just cottoned on to the threat to the print media.

However, Jenkins is not the only mainstream media journalist to note the growing power of the Internet. In the same issue of the Times, Dan Sabbagh writes that the Internet is ‘bad news for ‘real world’ press’. Focusing on websites that deal with money, gossip or what amounts to little more than trivia – like Popbitch – Sabbagh manages to tell us very little besides the fact the Internet is growing and newspaper sales are falling.

Intentionally or not, the effect is to keep us distracted from websites of real important. While Jenkins lamentation over the absence of such “qualities as newsgathering and reliability” on the Internet sounds more than a little hollow, especially when contrasted with the Times Middle East correspondent, Sam Kiley’s account of his own departure from the paper a few years ago.

As Kiley found when he tried to submit a story that was not in line with the paper’s editorial policy on Israeli assassinations:


Still Sam Kiley is that rare breed, a journalist with some genuine integrity, which is why he quit. The vast majority, however, are little more than “intellectual prostitutes” as John Swinton one of foremost journalists of his time described them during a dinner speech in 1890:


John Swinton, New York 1890.

Also see:
The Revolution Starts Here
www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=1447

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Last updated 18/03/2005

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