Trying to reflect the wider points that were brought up at last night’s debate I have written another article. This one concentrates more specifically on new media and the benefits it has brought to our journalistic endeavours.
Iain Dale, the Conservative blogger, has dismissed the merits of political reporting and emphasised the role new media is playing as a journalistic force.
In a debate at City University he said: “The political parties cannot control the new media because it’s full of such disparate elements. Reporters obviously need politicians as sources for stories – it’s very incestuous. There are all sorts of scandals over the recent years that people in the Westminster village knew were happening and yet they chose to conceal that from the rest of the British public.
“These cartels have been broken up by bloggers like Guido Fawkes, who has no party political affiliation – he’s just saying ‘a plague on all your houses.’ And he will recall some of these stories that journalists either wont or cant, for whatever reason. There are several examples of things that have appeared in recent years, stories that would have broken had blogs existed at the time.”
At the event, called ‘Political campaigners and reporters: partners in democracy or rats in a sack?’, Dale detailed how he increasingly sees blogs covering areas that are ignored by the mainstream press: “Editors want outrage, they are not particularly interested in logical argument, they want outrage and scandal. So parliamentary pages have disappeared from newspapers but they are now reappearing on newsletters, and blog sites will have a trawl through Hansard and get the stories that political reporters now don’t report.
“They are also holding the mainstream media to account in a way they haven’t before. And [journalists] hate, they absolutely hate, that there are people out there who are actually interested enough to check their facts are right. It’s the first time in years journalists are under scrutiny in the same way they put politicians under scrutiny. And I think that’s a thoroughly good thing.”
Dale, himself a former Parliamentary candidate, sees technology as a very important tool for political campaigning: “You have the incumbent MP with all the advantages and its very difficult, even in marginal seats, for a candidate to get heard. They are constantly having to innovate and come up with new ways to get themselves known among their electorate. And that’s where the new media can come in and they can set up their own blog site, and they can say what they want without the filter of the local media.”
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