Mirror, mirror on the wall

Dan Sabbagh (Hey Dan, how's the Googling going?) writes in the Times:

TYPING your name into Google is hardly an exercise for the modest. Until recently, journalists who yielded to the temptation would have found copies of and links to their articles. But the rise of blogging has changed the relationship — a recent search on Google found that somebody had written that one of my articles about podcasting was “quite possibly the most boring one that I have read”.

Criticism that was once simply spoken, or on a bad day expressed by scrunching up the newspaper, is now being published for the world to see — or to put it another way, the power relationship between print and online is tilting towards the internet.

Dan's right. In the old days when the press used to badmouth me and a bunch of other people who had a particular pass time in common (namely shooting) we used to speak to each other about it and, as Dan correctly suggests, we used to scrunch up the papers that peddled the tripe, lies and outright insults.

Now, criticism that was once written and spread throughout the country to be read by millions of people who looked to the trusted established media for opinion, facts and fairness will now be answered using the tools that we have at hand.

Tough luck to some of your media peers Dan old chum (who is likely a nice guy); they've had a run at frothing the masses against one minority group or other in the past and they've gotten away with it because, frankly, having an old moan over a pint and a torn up newspaper very rarely influences one persons opinion on an issue let alone the opinion of hundreds of thousands of people.

Some in the MSM will be looking at the blogosphere right now and they will be moaning. Moaning and completely failing to recognise their own reflection.

Posted by John at March 11, 2005 11:56 AM | TrackBack