The mainstream media give a select group of think tanks and corporate interests air space in the name of balance. The blogosphere can help rubbish much of the bias.
Our guest writer is Andrew Regan who runs Poblish, a new hub for the political blogosphere
Anyone who follows the BBC News site, or who reads a newspaper, will be familiar with a good few interest groups and think tanks. Where their news releases aren’t the entire basis for the story, they are invited to comment at length, in the name of political “balance”, or on the basis of an often-undeserved authority.
A great deal of our time as bloggers is thus spent exposing the same old partisan front groups – the TaxPayer’s Alliance, and so on – corporate shills, and organisations that exist purely and simply for the promotion of a particular set of views. While individuals can always change their mind on an issue, interest groups cannot, and will not. Moreover, their neatly packaged set of proposals can be tempting for governments running short of ideas, and short of friends.
Whether the groups are ostensibly on the left or the right, their influence can only be bad for politics. In the name of “balance”, the essential politics within a debate – the key issues and arguments – is drained away, or rechannelled to the financial benefit of one organisation.
Why should we – as bloggers – put up with seeing the same discredited arguments trotted-out again and again, and which we have argued over and over again, when we have – at our disposal – a vast resource of evidence, argument, and opinion to call upon?
What I propose is a collective – and non-partisan – organisation of political bloggers, which will challenge the interest groups in the name of honest and open politics, and provide newspapers and online news sites with a central resource that allows them to dispense with the services of self-interested think tanks and self-styled experts.
These bloggers would come together whenever required, putting aside their partisan interests, to tap the blogosphere’s collected wisdom – and, just as importantly, its memory – to fisk, rebut, and generally trump groups that are used to thinking in relative isolation. Bloggers will have many advantages, not least access to background information about the groups, via SourceWatch et al.
Of course I don’t propose that bloggers attempt to produce consensus. Not only is this implausible, but it would be dishonest, and would drop us into the same trap as the BBC and others. While artificial disputes help no one, genuine disagreements must come out. The public must have access to the full range of political opinion – no political cause benefits in the long run from anything different.
All in all, by shaking up lazy journalism, exposing lazy thinking, and by undercutting the “go-to” groups and “experts”, the reputation of the political blogosphere – as simply the best resource for distributed thought and opinion we have – must surely increase.
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24 Responses to “Harnessing the distributed intelligence of the blogosphere”
Gloria
Ben Goldacre appears to be having similar discussions on his site. There’s definitely a few schemes being cooked up there – http://www.badscience.net/2010/03/lib-dem-councillor-caroline-pidgeon-falls-for-bogus-rentokil-story-in-the-london-assembly/
I think it’s worth keeping an eye on FullFact – they’re aiming to look at facts behind politicians’ claims and interrogate how stats are being (mis)used by parties to make themselves look better. They’re non-partisan and can be found at
http://fullfact.org/
Boris Watch
This is very interesting – https://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/03/harnessing-the-distributed-intelligence-of-the-blogosphere/
Matthew Sinclair
Andrew,
What those quotes – from different campaign groups or other such opinionated voices – do is offer different possible interpretations of a given set of facts. Say there is the finding – perhaps from one of our reports – that there are a lot more high paid officers in local authorities than there used to be. We could interpret that fact as suggesting that the pay appears to have got out of control and needs to be curbed. Others will see things differently. In lieu of reading only in treatises, you need the quotes as a shortcut then the reader can decide which interpretation they believe is the most plausible. The art of writing a good quote is to use the small amount of space you have to make a persuasive case based on the facts in the story.
If the story is well written, readers should have the factual tools to help them make that decision over which interpretation they find the most convincing.
Is that a substitute for some kind of Socratic discourse or an exchange of academic papers resolved at a conference? No. But if you lose the quotes from people with opinions, you will have extremely stale journalism or just substitute the journalist giving their own opinion, without acknowledging the possibility of other points of view.
Best,
Matt
Andrew Regan
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your reply. To be honest my intention isn’t merely to cast suspicion upon think tanks and interest groups, but to question the commitment of journalists to the health of the polity, and to make a positive case for, as I put it, putting the distributed intelligence of the blogosphere to good and effective use – something that technology is beginning to make practical.
There’s certainly a feeling that for journalists to have a small set of sources they can rely upon to provide a neatly-packaged opinion – whether they be groups, or indeed the so-called “big name” bloggers – makes those journalists’ lives a little too easy, and initiates debates that are all too easily framed and polarised. Journalists can very easily be misled. Bloggers suffer from the same set of biases, however, they are accustomed to operating in an intellectually competitive world.
Interest groups have every right to state their opinions and run the gauntlet of public opinion, whatever their cause or ideology, but I challenge the level of access they currently have. That’s why I believe bloggers should aspire to operating collectively in order to challenge those groups that have a lot of political or media clout.