Westminster Skeptics asks: how influential are political blogs?
Put a group of political bloggers in the same room as someone deemed to be from "the media establishment" and what can you expect? This scenario was played out at the Westminster Skeptics meeting on Monday, with the political bloggers Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy, Jonathan Isaby, co-editor of ConservativeHome, Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, and Mick Fealty of Slugger O'Toole in attendance. "The establishment" was represented by Observer columnist Nick Cohen, and although he may not have agreed with this label, he certainly enjoyed it.
What the audience got from the bloggers' side included criticism of the "me too" mentality of the mainstream media, widely reported inaccuracies in the "mass media" and the London centricity of the mainstream media. From Cohen came the assertion that the internet, and by extension, blogs, are killing newspapers, warnings of the danger of blogs not bothering to do original reporting and, er, criticism of the London centricity of blogs.
Cohen's central point, in his own words: "The real problem is that the internet and long term decline in business is killing newspapers. No-one has the faintest idea. I want to argue against is a sense of complacency, the idea that you get from blogs that you can be a replacement for the mainstream media. [...] The central point of journalism is reporting, and blogs simply aren't covering it."
The most effective response to this view came from Sunny Hundal, who made a compelling case for political blogs that break stories. Including mentions of Dave Hill at the Guardian, Tim Ireland at Bloggerheads and Boris Watch, Hundal made particular mention of Adam Bienkov at Tory Troll, who was responsible for an FOI story about communication between City Hall and Prince Charles. This story later made it into the Guardian, The New Statesman and the Evening Standard.
Jonathan Isaby stood behind Hundal, saying: "contrary to what Nick said, we are producing our own stories, our own research." Isaby's view is that the relationship between journalists and bloggers is symbiotic. ConservativeHome is "reacting to what newspapers have said, but at the same time we are producing our own original stories and research, and the newspapers will regularly follow that up and use it as news stories." Jonathan also praised the low barriers to entry of blogs and the internet, which he said could be "representative of what George Osborne would call the 'post-bureaucratic age.'"
Paul Staines made a comment that "we don't need parliamentary reporters, because we all have access to Hansard on our laptop. If you're saying it's not being interpreted by a journalist and all the insight that they put into it, that may be true." The experiment of reporting on Hansard in a blog format has been tried once before in the ispystrangers project. Unfortunately this project appears to have stalled, perhaps demonstrating that the relatively neutered environment of the Commons and Lords doesn't provide enough scandal to keep an internet audience entertained.
For the pro-blogger position, so far so good, but a rather off handed comment by Paul Staines highlighted the main flaw in the anti-establishment position After a reference to the New Statesman (to be expected considering Nick Cohen's previous involvement with the magazine) Staines made the point that his blog's readership surpassed that of the New Statesman online. Staines has made this point several times before, often comparing his blog's larger online readership with the lower traffic of other, more established institutions.
This ego boosting argument undermined the position of the bloggers, and reinforced Cohen's original point that bloggers still can't do original reporting on the required scale. The New Statesman publishes ground breaking stories with global impact that you would never see on a political blog. The immediate example is Stephen Grey's investigation into CIA "extraordinary rendition," a story which implicated Governments across the world with the illegal torture of prisoners. It is currently not possible to finance and support such a large scale investigation using a blog, and more than that, these investigations exist above the partisan angles that these bloggers look for in their stories. The ghost plane story is an argument for good, objective investigative journalism that no political blogger today could hope to achieve. Because of this, we need "traditional" journalists more than ever.
Ultimately, despite the debate becoming heated at several points (thanks in large part to easy access to a well stocked bar), my overall feeling was that the future is likely to include more symbiosis between traditional, trained journalists and those who start at the bottom with a blog and work their way up. More journalists will use techniques pioneered by bloggers, and more bloggers will go after bigger stories. Bloggers will continue their role of fact checkers of the traditional media, and traditional media will continue to chase big stories and pound on doors. Although the upstart political bloggers and trained journalists may not work together, they are better together. Our political system is better off for the competition between old and new style political coverage, and we need more of it.
(Picture, videos and audio via spalpeen.co.uk - see below for audio)
Content published with thanks to Westminster Skeptics
For more on Westminster Skeptics visit their website, http://westminster.skepticsinthepub.org/, or Jack of Kent, http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/
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