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We had two of the country’s top political bloggers discussing Politcs and the Blog on the 1st April. Guido Fawkes spoke first, discussing the right’s hegemony over the left. He argued that two factors are key to this, namely Labour’s top-down attempts to create a comparable site to ConservativeHome and the fact that the predominantly left BBC has such a strangling dominance over the media at large. Rightly proud of the tabloid style of his blog, Guido also spoke with relish on the mounting political scalps that he has amassed.
John Redwood MP was up next and spoke extensively of the failure of the media to offer a thorough and critical analysis of government policy. Acknowledging his purposefully technical and demanding subject matter, Redwood spoke of how he is stirred to write after reading the documents of government; analysis of which he is required to do, in place of the failure of the mainstream media. His analysis of the financial crisis has certainly outstripped that of professional journalists by a country mile.
The audience included a litany of other top bloggers and as such the questions were excellent. We had many questions that focssed on the BBC. The room was thick with plots on how to bring down this behemoth. This would certainly be a welcome move: something for the politicians in the room to think about perhaps. As Guido rightly pointed out, the i-player is all very well, but without the BBC’s monopoly we could create the next Google.
