Old news?
Part of the reading for next week is about the coverage of the Downing Street Memo, leaked during the recent election campaign in Britain. The aspect about this I find curious is that for most people in Britain, I doubt this came as any great surprise - everyone has always assumed Blair was going to support Bush regardless.
Indeed, for people at home, the emergence of this memo was considered less significant than the leaking of the Attorney General's advice - that was seen as significant, since Blair has assured Parliament that the war was legal. To have been shown otherwise was a resignation issue for Blair.
We talk much in this course about the immediacy of information on the web, and the ease with which information can cross borders so quickly. Yet this seems to have been seen as some great revelation to some here in the US, even though much of this information had been discussed for many months in the media in the UK. So why was such a revelation to the people who set up the website? Anyone who had listened to evidence from the Hutton enquiry or the Butler report knew much of this information already.
It seems to me that many of the blogs, including large sites like Daily Kos, seem to actually rely on the MSM for their material. As such, they are more an alternative for editorial/opinion pages than for journlism per se - by which I mean the investigation and reporting of a story rather than the analysis of the story's impact.
The MSM media in the US has been curiously reticent in its reporting of Bush's regime - far more so than the UK's media. In many ways, the bloggers reaction to this story shows more about their reliance on the MSM to report the news, than on their ability to raise a story's profile or make the government more accountable.
Indeed, for people at home, the emergence of this memo was considered less significant than the leaking of the Attorney General's advice - that was seen as significant, since Blair has assured Parliament that the war was legal. To have been shown otherwise was a resignation issue for Blair.
We talk much in this course about the immediacy of information on the web, and the ease with which information can cross borders so quickly. Yet this seems to have been seen as some great revelation to some here in the US, even though much of this information had been discussed for many months in the media in the UK. So why was such a revelation to the people who set up the website? Anyone who had listened to evidence from the Hutton enquiry or the Butler report knew much of this information already.
It seems to me that many of the blogs, including large sites like Daily Kos, seem to actually rely on the MSM for their material. As such, they are more an alternative for editorial/opinion pages than for journlism per se - by which I mean the investigation and reporting of a story rather than the analysis of the story's impact.
The MSM media in the US has been curiously reticent in its reporting of Bush's regime - far more so than the UK's media. In many ways, the bloggers reaction to this story shows more about their reliance on the MSM to report the news, than on their ability to raise a story's profile or make the government more accountable.
2 Comments:
Speaking of the MSM: I heard an amazing quote the other day on the Laura Flanders Show on Air America Radio. I'm having trouble tracking it down. I've also been told it was heard on NPR, but I can't find it there (even through Nexis-Lexis), either. It was from a prominent newspaper editor, I believe, saying that, although you generally should look for multiple sources for a story, if the president of the United States tells you something, you don't need a second source. Talk about Disneyland! When did the president become King? If anyone heard this, please let me know (at "Shadow's Mews). Thanks.
I think you raise a good point about blogger reliance on traditional news outlets for most of the factual content of their blogs. Even the best blog content generally starts with a link to the MSM.
I've never been one who thinks that blogs will replace traditional journalism, because someone has to pay to send a reporter to the hill to watch a markup session and report on it; few will do that type of stuff for fun. But I do think that the op/ed function of blogs can push news coverage.
Much of the punditocracy in this country is dangerously ossified, especially on the left. Margaret Carlson would rather go to a dinner party than challenge conventional wisdom or the establishment power structure, so in that way it can be a valuable function to have an alternative op/ed structure to help move opinion.
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