A Liberated Fourth Estate

Breaking Down the Established Commentariat

Back in the day, political pamphlets were a big deal.  One only has to think of the Federalist Papers to evoke a reminder of how significant the happy convergence of the printing press with short, sharp, pithy political argumentation became.  One could go further back and argue that the German reformation owed a great deal to a controversial pamphleteer, one Martin Luther, whose mass produced pamphlets did much to carry the Reformation into villages, hamlets, and city back alleys, thereby capturing the popular imagination.

It seems that blogs have become a modern form of pamphleteering--now an influential media in their own right.  Some newspapers have presciently caught the wave and surfed it well.

Blogs changed everything – if not in the way we expected

Daniel Hannan  
The Telegraph 
March 7, 2014

It’s a bit of a shock to realise that this blog has now been going for seven years. In the dog-year world of blogging, that makes it almost geriatric. A few are more venerable yet, standing like oaks among the crocuses: Guido, Cranmer, ConHome. But this is a frantic and ephemeral business, and it’s an unusual blog that lasts more than twelve months.

Back in the pioneering days, blogs were seen as a challenge to the established media. And, in one sense, they were. When Guido scalped his first minister, Peter Hain, in 2008, something changed, though the newspapers were slow to notice. When, the following year, he aimed his tomahawk at Derek Draper and Damien McBride, old-style pundits were still laboriously explaining to their readers what these blog thinggies were. By the time Tim Yeo became Guido’s latest victim, no one needed to ask any more.

One of the perverse characteristics of the incumbent establishment media (whether electronic or print) has been its conspiracy of silence. The establishment media, representing a vast semi-official Commentariat elite, had developed an "establishment view" of what constituted news and what did not.  It had become an organ of Groupthink, if not Newspeak.

When a dozen dead tree newspapers determined the agenda, the media’s chief power lay in not reporting a story – not through conspiracy, but from shared assumptions about what constituted news. Take the leak of the “hide the decline” emails from climatologists at the University of East Anglia in late 2009. At first, the astonishing trove was reported only by bloggers. It wasn’t that environment correspondents were meeting behind drawn blinds and vowing to repress the discovery; it was that, being uncomplicated believers in the AGW orthodoxy, they couldn’t see why the emails were a story. Only when repeatedly needled by online commentators were they were eventually forced to report perhaps the biggest event in its field of the century.

The key moment came when the story was picked up by James Delingpole, whose post attracted 1.6 million hits. Tellingly, that post appeared here, on Telegraph Blogs. Blogs were now part of the established media. 

We have entered the age of the citizen journalist.  Well, actually, we have seen instances of the same thing in the past--think again of the Federalist Papers and Luther's pamphlets.  But, said the Commentariat, this would open the door to hucksters, rabble rousers, demagogues, and liars.  Irresponsibility, uncurbed by establishment guilds, would burst forth to the detriment of all. 

But freedom has its own in-built corrective.  It's called competition.  Propaganda in fact flourishes where liberty of expression is curtailed and controlled.

. . . . The separate categorisation of columnists, reporters, bloggers and interested readers is becoming meaningless. Every citizen is now a potential journalist. News and opinion are a conversation. We still hear occasional complaints from Leftie pundits that online media “lack quality control”. In fact, the dialectic element of blogging ensures a higher standard of accuracy than before. Mistakes are ruthlessly exposed and, because of the sheer number of outlets, a plausible new theory can spread with previously unimagined speed.

Blogs have improved veracity, quality and diversity. They have not led to the segregation by opinion that many predicted: Leftists and Rightists argue online in a way that never happened when people took just one newspaper. It's true that bloggers, being human, are as prone to cruelty, stupidity and error as anyone else. But it has never been easier to go elsewhere: more people are reading more news and comment than at any time in history.

Instead of fomenting and facilitating wacko conspiracy theories, for example, the new pamphleteers have been subjecting such inanities to more critical scrutiny than ever before.  Blogging has facilitated bringing opinions and arguments out into public view along with a consequent critical scrutiny.  Freedom of expression along with media which enable public dissemination will produce better, more accurate, and more informed public discourse over time.  As in any free market, the competition of ideas has increased their quality over time.  The crucible of criticism is a refining fire.

By contrast, unchallenged establishment views deteriorate to become progressively dumb, parroted by pavlovian minds.  "Everybody agrees. . . " rapidly becomes elevated to the faux-status of a winning argument.