Category: Media Ethics
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Nicholas Jones, 18 October 2007
Iain Dale is to be congratulated for highlighting the woeful failure of the left of centre in British politics to exploit the blogosphere. Of the top twenty political blogs featured in the Guide to Political Blogging 2007-8 , fourteen are from the right of centre and only two from the left.
Of even greater concern is the absence of any defining figures on the mainstream left to bridge the gap between "blogging and the traditional media".
Dale’s guide ranks the top 500 political blogs and as he observes with some justification, the "right of centre blogosphere" is in "a rude state of health" with not a single left wing blog having a mass readership anything like the size of the top seven or eight on the right.
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August 1, 2008
When the Democrats’ eight candidates for US President took part in a televised debate answering questions posted on the video-sharing website YouTube, they contributed to an event which was a first for American political campaigning and which will inevitably be copied and developed further by broadcasters and political parties in the United Kingdom.
New forms of media are opening up new ways of participating in politics and Britain, with its rich history of robust electioneering, is well placed to take advantage of the rapid growth in the use of the web and what has already become a highly-innovative form of communication.
But while welcoming new opportunities to engage with a section of the electorate which has been notorious in the past for its low levels of voting, there is no certainty that future turnout will be higher, nor is there any guarantee that the world-wide web will provide fairer or more accessible forms of political reporting.