I know I know: no sooner did I announce I was going to be blogging more this year than I all but disappeared off the Internet. Rest assured though, I haven’t been idle in my absence. Last week for instance I was on BBC Radio Suffolk’s Breakfast Show talking about Suffolk Police’s ‘no means no‘ campaign (where I reminded listeners of the Rape Crisis England and Wales Christmas campaign – Drinking is not a crime. Rape is – and suggested that “Don’t Rape” might be an effective campaign message to target at young men), and I also wrote this piece for Comment is Free about Lord Astor’s contribution to the HS2 debate. And by the way, if anyone’s around tomorrow morning and fancies being woken up by my dulcet tones, I’m due to be on BBC Radio Norfolk at some ungodly hour to talk about lap dancing clubs: I’ll let you know how that one goes.
In between all that, and working, and tweeting, and watching my beloved soaps (more on those in a future post), and getting hooked on BBC 4’s Borgen; like a lot of people with far too much time on their hands I’ve also been following the Leveson inquiry.
Now a ton of ‘stuff’ has already been written about Leveson, so I’m not going to bore on about it too much here, however, I couldn’t let Ian Hislop’s testimony pass without comment.
Because towards the end of Hislop’s evidence session this morning he was asked about the blogosphere and, surprisingly, he didn’t seem to have anything positive to say about it. Unfortunately I can’t find the exact quotes, as Hislop’s opinion on blogging is not what the MSM is focusing on – probably because a lot of similarly old-school print journalists agree with him – but what he effectively said was that blogging has no real value until and unless the issues bloggers are writing about find their way into the dead tree press. Up until that magical point when a blogger’s work gets picked up by a ‘real journalist’, according to Hislop the extensive research that a lot of us do, and the articles that we write, are nothing more than just “stuff” on the Internet.
He also said, and this is a direct quote, that there isn’t a lot of Private Eye content available online because he doesn’t see “why journalism, which at its best is a noble craft, should be given away.”
I suppose I’ve been around long enough now to know that this ridiculous and arbitrary divide still exists for some between so-called “professional” journalists and those of us who just write “stuff” for the Internet, but that doesn’t mean I’m not surprised when I hear it articulated, or that I’m not disappointed by it. I am, and especially when the editor of an allegedly anti-establishment, pro let’s-expose-all-the-bullshit-and-shenanigans organ like Private Eye engages in it. You’d think someone like Hislop would be grateful for citizen journalism and the way it’s helped expose wrongdoing and hold those in power more to account, but no, instead he appears to be utterly contempuous of it.
Maybe the attitudes he expressed this morning go some way to explaining why when his publication does get “stuff” from blogs he’s so loathe to give the original sources due credit….
Incidentally, it’s not just Hislop who’s got a downer on bloggers this week. According to our esteemed justice secretary Ken Clarke, a large proportion of bloggers are “nuts and extremists.” Still, we can at least console ourselves with the knowledge that if two such eminent personalities hate bloggers so much, some of us must be doing it right.
Too Much To Say For Myself 
Borgen is the Bomb!
Well hislop was the original young fogey wasn’t he? He probably thinks the internet is still a bit modern for him.
Fair enough not publishing the eye online, not crediting sources is a bit naughty.
I do think they’ve both got a bit of a point, (possibly because I’ve spent too long arguing with nutcase christians on CiF this week, I’m beginning to wonder if there is anyone sane on the netz). But naturally I think there’s a lot of quality writing on blogs as well…….
Hislop pretty much lost me as a reader when he did that interview a while ago, basically saying the fact that the supposedly anti-establishment Eye is still a complete old boys’ club is just because women don’t like writing satire (or some such nonsense). Nothing to do with his prejudices or anything then.
Not forgetting his sneer everytime twitter is mentioned.
Exposing the super injunctions that he is so against would have been impossible without citizne journalism. Trafigura anyone? Let alone the fact that if it wasn’t for feminist bloggers, news about women and VAWG would rarely be seen or heard.
oh by the way, there are certain columns in the Eye which just repeat stuff that is fed to them by their sources (and I know this because I know the background to the stuff they report and who some of the sources are). This results in some outrageous either plain misstatements of fact, or heavy bias. Hislop should sort that out.