Frontline postscript

Thursday's World Press Freedom Day discussion at the frontline club was humbling for anyone - like me - who's spent their professional lives in the relative comfort of the UK media. You could say that fretting about how the anglo-saxon world's politicians and political journalists are trying to grab the blogosphere for themselves is kinda missing the point. Ethan Zuckermann and Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah brought to the discussion accounts of bloggers (and journalists) intimidated, imprisoned, closed down, unplugged.
The simple truth that the web enables more people to speak more freely to a bigger audience than ever before has got to be A Good Thing and I can't think of a single argument against it - not even when blogging is at its most uncivil or social networking at its most irreverent.
But the web's value as a medium through which the (potentially amplified) civic conversation takes place doesn't automatically make it the answer to our broken politics' prayers. Worse, the danger is that both politicians and political journalists - in the anglo-saxon world at any rate - are tending to make the parts of the web they occupy resemble all that was wrong about politics and political journalism in the first place.
Suw Charman argued - and I don't disagree with her at all - that many bloggers here in the UK post about real-world political experiences and issues, the ambulance service, the NHS and so on; that blogging constitutes an alert, engaged, bothered conversation. Kevin Anderson adds the thought that this is a reflection of the way in which most people "relate to governance and policy differently than politician and journalists."
Exactly - that's the precise point of the disconnect; the exact place the wires have been cut. Martin Moore takes this one step further and asks whether these conversations - including those involving councillors and candidates and activists - shouldn't "feed directly into politics at a local level"?
But that's the point - they don't. Neither locally nor nationally. And one of the reasons they don't is the way in which our politics and political press have co-evolved over the past quarter century; that co-evolution has neutered ideology, stunted political debate and replaced it with a hand-book of standard scenes that have litle to do with the connection of conversation with action and everything to do with tomorrow's headline.
Soooo ... blogging, good; social networking, good; civic conversation, good. But is the web the the tool that will mend what's broken? No.

Political blogging

It seemed a good idea at the time. Now I'm not so sure. Next Thursday, I'm at the frontline club with Ben Hammersley - one of my favourite gurus and blogger - and Richard Gizbert - of the al Jazeera 'Listening Post'. Blogger Ethan Zuckermann - co-founder of Global Voices and blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah will join by phone.

We'll be talking about political blogging. An uneven contest, especially since I'm the - alleged - sceptic in the line-up. And even more especially since I'm not in the least sceptical about blogging ... whatever that would mean.

What I am sceptical about is that blogging or any other form of social networking can fix what's bust about our politics and our political journalism. In fact, it's more likely to make them both worse.

Each new alliance of social media and politics has one or more of these claims made about it;

• it's an attempt to bridge the gap between politicians and the public
• it brings a voice to the conversation that's been marginalised by conventional politics and political journalism
• it enables direct communication between politician and elector without the mediation of broken political journalism

Each of which is fine in itself. But while all of these contribute to the civic conversation, they aren't the problem. I can see little evidence that blogging or any other form of social networking increases the trust - still at floor level - that voters have in politicians or in those who report their doings to them. I can't see how a blogging politician is any closer to his/her constituency than one who holds surgeries, makes speeches at prize-givings and knocks on the occasional door.

From what I see of the successful political blogs - let's take Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes for instance - they replicate the inward looking, metropolitan chumminess of the Westminster village that many in the audience find repellent in both politics and political journalism. Similarly, I'm left wondering what it is or might be that Benedict Brogan, say, or Daniel Hannan (political journalists both, politician the latter) might say in their blogs that they might not say in their columns, leaders or - in Daniel Hannan's case - addresses to the European Parliament.
It's inevitable, too, that - as Joe Trippi told Jeff Jarvis - politics on social networking sites will become dominated by 'makaka moment' videos ... accentuating rather than countering a similar trend in political reporting.

Crucially, though, no form of social networking bridges the gap that has to be bridged. And that's the one that used to be filled by party organisation that joined the civic conversation to political action - formally in the case of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, informally in the case of the Conservatives. It's fine to have a robust and energetic civic conversation ... but a conversation is exactly what it says it is; talk.

I can see how blogging enables that conversation; I can't see how ideologies are derived from it nor how political judgement and action are derived except in a nervy, fractured obedience to some assessment of 'the public mood'. Which is precisely the problem in the three way relationship between people, politicians and political journalism.

Let's see how Thursday goes.