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News machine outfoxed by bloggers

The online community has become a powerful force in shaping public opinion, writes Paul Carr.

Last month, the Boston affiliate of America's Fox TV network ran a news item about a new craze sweeping cyber space. It turns out that all over America young people are creating websites full of information about their daily lives.

Or, as Fox's breathless reporter put it, "to catalogue the details of their lives on web pages created for them, by them ... just blah-blah-blogging".

Incredible. I wonder what burgeoning technological trend Rupert Murdoch's news machine will uncover next? Mobile tar-tar-telephony? The rah-rah-radio? Far-far-fire? The devil may have the best tunes but it'll be a long time before he works out how to upload them to his aye-aye-iPod.

Fortunately in most other sections of the media, attitudes towards blogging - and online journalism in general - couldn't be more different. Not only are news organisations rolling out blogs of their own, but in the past year the influence of bloggers over their print, television and radio counterparts has grown massively.

Consider a decision made by organisers of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston next month. So keen are they to get their message through to the people of Blogistan that for the first time they have issued press accreditation to political bloggers.

Just try to imagine any major political organisation recognising blogs in the same way this time last year and you'll realise how far bloggers have gone up in the estimation of those in power. Or, in the case of the DNC, those who will probably be in power next year, voter fraud notwithstanding.

An even more impressive example of how web journalism has started to influence the mainstream media comes from the US's newest radio network, Air America Radio. The New York-based station was set up as a liberal challenge to the dominance of right-wing talk radio in the US.

Through affiliates in cities from New York to Honolulu, angry liberal voices such as Al Franken, author of the anti-Bush bible Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and Hollywood's Janeane Garofalo are taking on right-wing blowhards such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly.

But unlike Limbaugh and O'Reilly, who frequently replace research and reason with rage and rhetoric, Air America's hosts are armed to the teeth with hard, up-to-the second facts to support their relentless Bush bashing. Their sources? Blogs. And the blogging bloggers who blog them.

On Garofalo's show, barely a minute goes by without Janeane or her co-host Sam Seder referring to a news article or nugget of information they have discovered via a weblog or online news source. And they're not afraid to admit it, either. At the end of each day's show all of the links mentioned are reposted on their show's own blog, Majorityreportradio.com.

And the influence of the web on Air America's output doesn't stop there. Its small affiliate base - 11 stations, compared with the 666 that broadcast Limbaugh's show - means a large percentage of listeners listen online.

The effect of this is to guarantee a large web-savvy audience for the station, an audience for whom it is perfectly natural to visit the shows' official blogs and to comment on what they're hearing, as they're hearing it.

And by crikey do the presenters listen to their critics. Not only do Garofalo and Seder frequently read out blog feedback as it comes in, but they once halted an interview with the rock bore-ette Peaches after bloggers complained it was the worst thing the station had ever broadcast. Add to this the fact that bloggers and online journalists frequently appear as guests, and Air America starts to look like the world's first major blog-powered radio station. But if it is, it certainly won't be the last.

As the popularity of internet radio continues to grow and as more people discover the beauty of Blogistan, it will soon become almost impossible to utter a sentence on the air without it being torn apart by an army of live critics.

What will be interesting to see is how the radio stations adapt to this new level of accountability.

I hope they follow Air America's lead and work alongside bloggers rather than against them. After all, it's not so easy to sound convincing about the war in Iraq or tax cuts or global warming when listeners have access to billions of pages of information and you're armed only with a hunch and a microphone.

Blah-blah-blogging may be just a craze to Fox, but to almost everyone else it's a terrifyingly powerful influence on what the media say and how they say it. And it's an influence that the world's talk radio hosts ignore at their peril.

Posted by thinkum at July 1, 2004 03:16 PM