I totally agree. We are poorly served these days by the media. Blogosphere for me!

I’m about to start a social experiment this weekend to entirely stop using mainstream news channels and rely on blogs to provide me with all my news and current affairs.

I actually expect to be better informed about a wider range of issues through concentrating my attention on the blogosphere than by spending my time watching regular news and reading newspapers.

Stu – that’s a very interesting idea. Is there any way that could be measured as a study, you think? To make the results more definitive?

And when the news does hit the headlines reporters are too lazy to analyse the real truths

Sunny,

I suppose if someone were willing to stop using blogs entirely and only ever use mainstream media, and then we each posted a weekly roundup of our interpretation of the week’s important stories (which is what I was planning on doing) then the internet at large could compare and make their own decision…

Stu, I gave up on The Guardian and the New Statesman over a year ago and I’m probably better informed than ever. The media – even of the vaguely liberal sort – give you the IMPRESSION that you understand but blogging is interactive: you get to put your ‘understanding’ to the test. You form an oppinion, let others take pot-shots at it and if it’s any good it will survive.

And because its largely anonamous you don’t feel stupid when you are wrong.

I gave up with much of the so called liberal media some time ago. The Independent has moved rightwards for the last 10 years. Not in the position the paper takes but the filling up of editorial with Conservative and right wing columnists. I never thought I would see the day when they would hire the discredited Tory tub thumper Bruce Anderson, but they have given him a job for the last 10 years despite being wrong about most things. His columns about how great Bush was going to be back in 2001 are hilarious.

The Guardian has for some time made no secret of the fact that they were trying to attract an American readership. It seems all media now wants to chase the famous Fox audience. And in doing so they move to the Right. CNN has become laughable.

A recent report out yesterday showed the American media giving Conservatives and Republicans more airtime by a margin of 2-1 since the turn of the year even though Obama won a landslide. When Bush was at his highest point the media claimed that as the Right was in power, it made sense to have them on more than the left. Now the Right is in opposition apparently the rules have changed and the Republicans must have more airtime to oppose Obama. Of course , the real reason is that corporate news is biased to the Right and does not want to upset its sponsors.

*In total conspiracy mode*

May be it is a matter that the MSM is deliberately hiding or downgrading these stories so as to dupe the public into thinking that things are not as bad as would seem?

Excellent piece.

Stu, I did that for a few days last year out of the same curiosity. It didn’t really work very well…

I read the Times now and again, but usually get my news sources from blogs.

The Sun and Mail are just full of biased crap, and thats just the news articles, I wont even go into the reader comments.

OP: “Or there is the case of Manchester police seizing a server from Indymedia. Some commenter posted the address of a judge in the case of animal rights nutters, and the police wanted the IP address. However Indymedia doesn’t log IP addresses; they removed the comment in compliance with their site guidelines but in not logging IP addresses, they’re in breach of an EU Directive on data retention. Again this looks like an important story.”

I have little sympathy with Indymedia owing to their childish (IMHO) content. However, there may be a way around the EU directive on data retention. If the logging data is encrypted with a public key and the private key is lost, then the data remains private.

According to the EU directive:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32006L0024:EN:NOT

and in particular:
“(c) the data shall be subject to appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure that they can be accessed by specially authorised personnel only;”

there is a requirement that the data holder protects the source of communications. Encrypting that data is encrypted is the safest way to do it. Just remember where your private key is located for the “specially authorised personnel”.

The reason that the student protests were ignored is largely down to the fact that students are perhaps the most inconsequential strikers of all.

It is ridiculously easy to ignore student protests because the only people they inconvenience are other students. Even those inconvenienced students don’t care, it just means that their lecture is canceled, and they go home mildly annoyed at forking out £2.50 on a daysaver.

The student protests were not news because they were not newsworthy.

“The narrative about depoliticisation is not true” I’m afraid it is, David. I went to a Stop the War meeting last year with Mark ‘off the telly’ Steel in attendance and there may have been a dozen people in the room. A 10% turn out in student elections is considered decent.

I’d prefer it if students gave a crap – particularly about issues where they can actually make a difference, like tuition fees or residence rates – but the vast majority, sadly, do not.

Let me just put in a plug for the London Review of Books – should be required reading for every Conspirator.

Well if you’d like an example of double standards, look at today’s Guardian and CiF. Polly Toynbee has written a decent (for once, although she still lets New lab off the hook toomuch,; yes, the Tories may be worse, but you still shouldn’t excuse the surrender of power to City business types by New Lab) piece.
The subject: large business avoidance.
Commenting appears to have been disabled.
Might this have something to do with the vast amounts of tax avoided by the Guardian itself..?

It seems an obvious question to me, but who is going to provide the news on which all this comment is based, if the media ceases to exist?

How many blogs pay for, say Reuters or AP, or whoever?

It seems an obvious question to me, but who is going to provide the news on which all this comment is based, if the media ceases to exist?

Heh, yeah I was thinking that too. Its interesting what Huffpost do. They not only have AP newswires published, but they also mix reporting with commentary – which newspapers still don’t do (officially).

http://notimetothinkbook.com/

@ Will Rhodes…not at all. As any number of journalists readily admit, it’s more to do with an underlying perversion of news values (or, indeed the inadequacy of news values in toto) than to do with a conspiracy. Though, on the other hand, the open racial bent of some newspapers is not unknown.

@ Sunny…I didn’t get any of these stories from the mainstream media, I picked them up from people and newslists with direct access to the activists on the ground. I’m not calling for the abolition of full-time, paid journalism. In fact such a thing would be nothing short of disastrous for excellent current affairs magazines such as Private Eye. However, we need to open up the field by making more people familiar with journalistic practices and recruiting them into a network where they can make use of those practices and disseminate the results.

“It seems an obvious question to me, but who is going to provide the news on which all this comment is based, if the media ceases to exist?”

How about Wikinews? They provide ten stories per day with dubious original content.

OP: “And yet there are an enormous amount of stories which are of huge importance but which are receiving minimal coverage, for some reason.”

News is not just fact or importance but interesting content. I receive the trade press for my profession, and I typically spend twice as long looking at the job adverts than the so-called news stories. Local newspapers are always desperate for content, but a political demo has zero news value unless you have something equivalent to “WI calendar girls”. You don’t have to take your clothes off but you must be interesting.

Getting the local paper to cover your story is essential. If they aren’t interested, it won’t go on the wire and it won’t be covered by the nationals.

Broadcasting your story via topic related blogs is generally ineffectual because you are preaching to the converted. Exceptionally, use the blogosphere to broadcast human rights stories because you will hit journalists.

Cultivate local journalists, but understand that they won’t be interested if you don’t have an interesting story. Interns are a good starting point: they want to prove themselves and the good ones will sell your story much better than you are able.

Primarily: you must be interesting.

we need to open up the field by making more people familiar with journalistic practices and recruiting them into a network where they can make use of those practices and disseminate the results.

Make media studies mandatory. Solved. Also, every teenager should be made to do a course in personal finance.

@21 – er, no, local papers aren’t always desperate for content. I’ve been part of efforts in my local constituency to get the Labour candidate into the local papers and the results have hardly been spectacular – no matter what we planned, and let me assure you that there were bundles of things more “interesting” than what locals news does report down this end of the country -a lot of which turns out to be BS in any case.

More importantly, however, why should we have to fit into what they consider news values to be? Are we suddenly buying into the notion that newspapers never do anything unless it sells papers? They’re not an uncomplicated reflection of the values and desires of their readers – they are, on the other hand, underfunded, understaffed and swamped by local businesses and other potential advertisers looking to get stories printed for one thing or another.

@ 22…I don’t think media studies has anything to do with it. Press credentials in this country are a jealously guarded privilege when they shouldn’t be; if we’re a democracy, people who can demonstrate interest – whether by running a blog for a number of years or by campaign work or howsoever else “interest” can be measured – should have access to all the privileges which carrying a press card can bestow. I honestly believe that an immense amount of people around the country could be more talented working cooperatively in their spare time than many of the people we call journalists are in their paid time. And I don’t especially blame the journos for that. It’s the churnalism-inspiring bosses.

My media studies mark was a bit factitious, but it’s certainly true that very few people understand how news is made into news. If people thought more critically about what they were being told then there wouldn’t be such a chronic need for citizen journalism.

But, you’re right. Churnalism seems to be a good 90% of everything that appears in papers or on the telly. Anyone who hasn’t already should read Nick Davis’ Flat Earth News. Bloody brilliant book.