*guffaw*

Very often progressive critiques of media will rely on the fact of corporations and big-money being involved to demonstrate bias in the media. Now there are clear examples of this, i.e. Murdoch forbidding his news networks to do any reporting about China that might endanger his business deals there. But progressive critiques usually go too far, as they tend to argue that all media is slanted to the Right in ways that are utterly unverifiable (i.e. does the way Iraqi and American casualties are depicted in a US paper reflect a bias towards the Americans that is unjustified? If you say yes, you may be a citizen of the globe, but at the price of holding your own country in contempt).

There is no ambiguity with Charles Johnson’s attempts to detect media bias. When he catches a photo that has clearly been photoshopped to make things look worse than they are, or catches CBS outright falsifying a story, he makes the Right’s loonier charges look very credible, and shows that bias has less to do with where the money is, but with who holds what ideology. What’s more is that when he’s mistaken, he can be held accountable. The way progressive critiques of media are framed, it is impossible many times to say that the authors have made mistakes, or if anything they’ve said holds water.

Also – I enjoy blogging but might not want to blog using an institutional hat – that’s the fun behind blogging. There is a democratic side to blogging where everyone is equal regardless of their institutional hats, I like this.

Sometimes, blogging is like talk radio on-line …

Open Democracy do a nice job with comment and campaigning I think, but it’s hardly reaching out to the ‘grassroots’ but still is very effective in what they do.

Halima

It’s hard enough to connect researchers with policy makers (in part because of cultural differences about what is reasonbale to do with evidence) and I think as Zohra and Sunny point out the differences are far greater when it comes to bloggers.

I was recently invovled in an e-conference looking at Mixed Race issues (http://mixedness.millipedia.net/) which brought together short papers – some academic some personal – for people to comment on and discuss. It was a useful and novel platform for people to read material and find organisations but in terms of meaningfully engaging with the ideas it was limited by the format (short disconnected comments) and perhaps in the range of people that are drawn to such online activity (who might only be interested in giving their existing opinions).

I think the onus then is on bloggers to engage with published research and comment on it in the same way that reporters might do in Guardian’s Society supplement. It might not be a direct route to the grassoots but it can widen the reach of material and hopefully drive up the quality of the blogsphere. It’s something I try to do anyway (http://oproject.wordpress.com/category/themes/research/) although perhaps like newspapers I am also guilty of blogging about polls which give neat headlines but little else.

An advantage of the internet surely is that research can be found, linked to and disseminated so easily (research that is only available in hard copy or at a price seems to be at a tremendous disadvantage). I agree with Zohra that reserachers might not have the inclination, time or ability to blog themselves (and anyway once it’s ‘out there’ they will only be one voice in a crowd) but they do need to think harder about what happens after they have published. ESRC are currently very good at bringing reserach to the people (most recently in their recent glossy magazine summarising their key projects, available in EH Smith)

ps Sunny – what’s happened to NGN??

Thanks for the reply. I think I wrote one of the worst sentences ever, up above at 44.

If you would bear with me, what I was trying to say was that attention is a marketplace. It is, frankly almost beyond belief, nearly 40 years after the Equal Pay Act, that there should be a need for your organisation to be dealing with this issue at all. It suggests that, despite legislation, despite apparent goodwill, that the degree of apathy or ignorance about the issue has left it to wither.

What I was trying, very badly, to suggest is that if issues like your own are to be kick started, then policy folk and politicians meeting together is clearly not the answer. If, and I’d agree it’d be difficult, there was to be some engagement with a broader church of activists, or even just folk that read blogs come to that, then the political inertia might be easier to overcome.

Where I think Sunny and Leon are right is in thinking that this is a new, and extremely powerful, way of engaging people. But it is still at an early stage of it’s development, particularily in the UK.

To be honest, I’d think that your own topic would be unlikely to cause much controversy on here

But, even the least controversial threads can run off topic.

I agree with all three of your points, especially about the “elitism” and the need to open up the process to PEOPLE, for whom this reports are targeted towards (and discuss in the name of). But also, I’d like to point out a couple of things:

1. There simply cannot be enough time for people to sit down and write posts if you work full time.
2. If you research for a living, sometimes, when you get home around 8 pm, you just want to zone out or many spend time with your family/friends/etc, not get back on the computer and blog about what you just left at the office.
3. Publishing: Reports that get publised are the result of spending months, even years, of painsakingly making sure that all of the information is correct and put together thoughtfully. Many would be hesitant to blog about things they’ve just stumbled upon during their research but haven’t made sense of it yet. And to post blogs on something that might potentially turn out to be inaccurate is disseminating information, which is anathema to any good org.
4. Some orgs are built on the fact that they publish good, sound reports. For them to publish their stuff on blogs before it getting published on a finalized hard copy and “trademarked” (so to speak) is to in a way undermine their own ability (and reputation) for delivering well thought out analyses (because others could very well easily pick their stuff up and incorporate it).

That said, there ARE human rights orgs and NGOS that have blogs. Amnesty International does on a few issues such as the death penalty, Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission does, as well as the UN (called UN Dispatch). There are many more that I’ve come across but haven’t tabbed. But they are there.

In terms of the elitism charge (which I think is not entirely fair), the reason I might choose to lobby a politician directly rather than write on this blog is directly related to my ideas on how change happens.

For a campaign group with limited resources, I think this is the material point. While it would be nice to spend all my time on blogs (ok, not really since there’s all that vitriol), I’m not yet convinced that blogs make change happen when they are about the debate, rather than about the organizing of particular actions.

Is it really that I don’t know the power of the internet? From my perspective, it’s that there are other ways to meet your two learning points that have already been shown to be effective whereas the evidence on blogs’ influence on politics in the UK is still extremely limited (happy to discuss how the Iraqi workers campaign was effective precisely because it was still about direct lobbying and not about debates on blogs).

For example, on evidence about wide acceptance of ideas, we can use Mori polls (proven to be effective with politicians), which is easier and faster for us than trying to gauge acceptance via blogs (how would we do that? Count the number of ‘I agree’ comments? Remember politicians care about votes). And on rehearsing counter arguments, we work cross-party and do spend time on understanding where resistance to particular proposals lies by asking the resisters directly.

Hello everyone, I am the ‘her’ and the ’she’ in this conversation and I work for the Fawcett Society.

Sunny, there seems to be some confusion here around terminology with the result that I’m reading two ideas from your post:

1. campaign groups like Fawcett need to work with grassroots (who are these people, and ‘work with’ in what way?) and the (best/only) way to do that is through blogs

2. campaign groups need to avoid intellectual stagnation, and the (best/only) way to do that is by engaging with blogs

My response to this is:

On the one hand you’re asking campaign groups (e.g. Fawcett) to engage with ‘the masses’ – which you conflate with ‘grassroots’ – as if they aren’t already. Just because I don’t regularly write on blogs (as part of my Fawcett work) doesn’t mean these groups aren’t engaged at grassroots levels, e.g. Fawcett’s No Pay Day campaign: http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/index.asp?PageID=515 (I swear I’ll remember the html to make those links work properly soon; my cms doesn’t require it).

On the other hand you’re saying “But unless we get more people working at grass-roots, doing research or developing policy actually engaging with others on their ideas, it means intellectual stagnation” which means what exactly (because the sentence is having grammatical problems)? Because the research and policy development does actually engage with quite a few others – many active at the grassroots – through seminars, roundtables, conferences, etc. (e.g. my project on ethnic minority women: http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/index.asp?PageID=375). And it is this work that mitigates against your ‘intellectual stagnation’ threat while also engaging with grassroots work.

What you seem to be calling for is a broader online engagement at the level of ideas – i.e. debates on the blogsphere and not online organizing/activism – as if this guarantees wider participation in a way that is better than other ways of widening participation (e.g. through a conference or mass action). But in my opinion, there is nothing inherently grassroots about being online and neither is there anything particularly grassroots about spending time debating.

More importantly, blogs don’t appear to me to be all that good at widening participation: they are full of jargon, can be technically daunting for people, are culturally exclusive (in terms of codes of conduct for example where a certain level of abuse and negativity is accepted), are resource intensive (takes time to read through all these posts and comments and think about what to write back, computer and internet access etc) and ultimately require more work to make the investment translate into action/connection with others/social change.

I’d like to throw the challenge back to you – prove that blogs are effective at making change happen and you’ll see groups like Fawcett (and others you have in mind that are also short on resources) using them more.

“DailyKos.com is one of the most brilliant blogs on the web.”

If you consider the Guardian to be a bit too right-wing for your tastes.

Ros:

“Rumbold,
As you can see, it worked all right. Thanks again.

Just passing on Leon’s lore.

Douglas:

“What happy, innocent days they were back then, when we gathered around the feet of the great master and learned these arcane secrets.”

We were so young and carefree then. Where has His Grace, the Duc de Nemours gone?

Point.

Why not ask your friend if she’d like to post something here and then we can all see what kind of response it gets? There are some pretty clever folk that comment on here, maybe something specific like that would draw out their expertise?

Your comment about elitism, specifically:

who feel that testing their ideas amongst the masses serves no purpose and they should concentrate solely on lobbying.

suggests that they haven’t really got their heads around the genuine power that the internet can potentially provide.

If they can persuade an audience here, then they should find persuading politicians a lot easier, for two reasons, firstly because they will have more evidence that their ideas are acceptable to a wider audience and secondly, because the counter arguements will all have been well rehearsed.

DailyKos.com is one of the most brilliant blogs on the web.

Other good ones are:
http://www.tpmcafe.com
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/