Andrew Marr went off on one at the Cheltenham Literary Festival this weekend: "A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people. OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.”
As Old Big Ears used the journalistic weasel-phrase “a lot of” to cover his bony backside, it would be futile for me to point out that, while I may have my failings, I don’t consider myself “inadequate”, I haven’t had to Clearasil a pimple in many years, and I’m a family man. I may very well be “seedy”, but no seedier than Andrew Marr, judging from some newspaper items of fairly recent vintage. I sport a full head of hair and breathe through a fairly standard nose. I’m about four decades north of “young”, write in my office at the top of the house, I haven’t been drunk in over a quarter of a century, I write when time allows, but rarely late at night, and, while I rant on a regular basis, I don’t consider myself a particularly angry person. And I think it would be unkind to characterize what I produce as “spewings” – although some of the subjects I cover certainly make me want to spew.
In addition, I spent much of 2008 and 2009 working with a former blogger – the first to be imprisoned for something they wrote - and he is one of the most intelligent, cultured and temperate people I have ever known. Another friend writes an extremely intelligent, long-standing blog about wasteful and ineffective government plans to more effectively identify and track people in this country. It’s packed with fascinating facts squeezed out of a secretive and high-handed civil service – I can’t imagine any professional investigative journalist doing a better job, but I can imagine most of them doing a far worse one.
What has really got up Marr’s perfectly-formed hooter is the phrase “citizen journalism”, and the fact that many of the bean-counters and marketing wankers who run our media these days are grasping at this largely meaningless concept to justify plans to sack professional journalists. Mostly nonsense, of course: I’d much rather read Simon Heffer, Charles Moore, Nick Cohen or Mark Steyn than another rank amateur such as myself. But I’d prefer to read thoughtful, original amateur blogs than anything by the vast majority of “professional” journalists, who are nothing more than paid propagandists for the left-liberal elite which runs – and ruins - this country.
And is Marr seriously arguing that political bloggers such as Guido Fawkes and Ian Dale are of less interest than the anodyne piffle that passes for political journalism in most of our newspapers and on all of our TV channels? Or that the “citizen journalism” that fueled the brave but doomed attempt of the Iranian people to reverse their stolen national elections last year was somehow less valid or significant than some dreary little lefty droning away about cuts in the New Statesman?
The blogosphere, like the internet as a whole, is choc-full of truly vile, rancid, hate-filled, hateful, twisted garbage – there’s no shortage of illiterate calibans delighted to void their bowels online. But this filth is easy enough to spot and avoid, and no one (except for Marr) for one moment thinks of it as “citizen’s journalism”. As for the rest, there are millions of people living in democracies who feel that no political party adequately represents their views, and, as long as we’re not advocating murder, violence, suicide or sexual abuse, I can’t believe that allowing some of us a space to vent is anything but healthy.
Obviously, Andy spends his time amongst the liberal urban politico-media elite, but - who knows? - even non-members might occasionally have something interesting to say.
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