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.
