Political blogging's pretensions

You have only a few hours to catch this, but it's worth seeing last night's Newsnight (available here) before it's replaced by this evening's edition. The item of particular interest is described this way:

Guido Fawkes

He says that traditional political journalists are too close to the very MPs they claim to scrutinise and so short change the viewer. They say that he misunderstands their role. Who is right - the controversial blogger or the political lobby? In a special piece - Guido confronts his broadcast and print counterparts - and goes up against the Guardian's Michael White, live.

I know nothing of the pseudonymous Mr Fawkes, but I'm deeply sceptical of the value of political blogs and hostile to the whole medium of blogging. (I argued the point here and here.) Mr Fawkes's film is in my view ludicrous self-promotion, the vapidity of whose message is emphasised by the absurd affectation of its author's wishing to be anonymous and to be filmed only in darkness. (According to one of his interviewees, BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson, he wasn't particularly straight in his editing either.) Michael White spiritedly referred to Mr Fawkes in the discussion afterwards as "Paul Staines" and generally made Staines (if that is indeed his name) look foolish. I don't know if Staines is foolish, but his argument certainly is. I recommend you watch and relish White taking it apart.

I'm increasingly convinced not only that blogs impoverish our political culture but that they poison it too. The Times columnist Libby Purves wrote this week that "there should be at least a degree of justifiable fear and public contumely surrounding libellous bloggers", among others, and I agree. Yet - a point made by White - bloggers in practice write what they like without inherent constraints of accuracy. They aren't in the normal course of events sued, because the potential costs greatly outweigh any benefit. I am close to being an absolutist on freedom of speech; I don't believe that something that is offensive is necessarily wrong, and in any case that offensiveness is no grounds for restricting speech. But the absence of an editorial function, of which bloggers themselves make much, is one reason for being apprehensive at the potential destructiveness of the medium. Something must give; I hope it is the unwarranted reputation of blogs as a source for political coverage. Watch the Newsnight discussion, and see if I'm not right.

NOTE: This is a trivial point of autobiographical concern, but is one I should declare in this discussion. As some of my readers may recall, I am the counterexample to the notion that bloggers can't be sued, as I appear to be the only UK blogger ever to have received a writ for libel. Ironically it was a worthless claim issued with high incompetence in the wrong court by a hapless blogger who didn't even deny the truth of what I had written about him (notably here). Being certain of my facts, I declined to withdraw my remarks let alone apologise for them, and my lawyers had no difficulty having the purported writ immediately struck out by the Court as an abuse of process. (My antagonist then enterprisingly appealed to me to help him out of the hole he'd dug for himself and acquiesce in his abuse of process - a plea whose merits I could not discern and which my lawyers therefore declined.) My point is that with so much genuinely defamatory stuff around on the Web, it's notable that this experience is so unusual, and that those who have legitimate cause for complaint are in the main reticent.