New post on the ABC’s Opinion Page is cross-posted over the fold. There’s some other great stuff there today, including a piece on a useful possible running-mate for Barry O’Bama
Andrew Landeryou responds this morning to a bizarre intervention by Neil Mitchell in the blog-gate affair, where he suggests that the Liberal bloggers should be prosecuted for “cyber-bullying”.
It leads Landeryou to offer a colourful call to arms, where he suggests that the activities of Australia’s blogosphere point towards a potential “golden age of political journalism”. He riffs a little on the decline of The Age, then says:
For all its downside, the new possibilities for communicating have the potential to usher in a golden age of political journalism, no longer monopolised by cultural elites but populated by a seething mix of leftards and patriots slugging it out, sometimes with harsh words, sometimes persuading, sometimes preaching to the choir but almost always adding to the sum total of human knowledge, debate and thought in a way that vastly exceeds what our grand-parents and their parents were able to enjoy. This is truly the golden age for political journalism and don’t let any Monthly reading, beret wearing lefty grouch in a Westgarth coffee shop tell you otherwise.
It might be an overly combative vision of the blogosphere’s potential, but broadly, I hope he’s right. It’s worth reading the piece in its entirety.
He’s also reminded me that I must pick up my beret from the dry-cleaner.
One of the topics that consistently exercises the Australian blogosphere is global warming. What’s at issue, of course, is whether or not human, industrial activity is contributing to an increase in global temperatures, and possible environmental catastrophe.
There is an orthodox scientific view on this, as expressed in documents like the IPCC Report, the Stern Report, the Garnaut Report etc. It’s fair to say that most left-leaning bloggers and many centrists accept this view. But there are prominent blogospheric voices - including very popular bloggers like Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt and Jennifer Marohasy - who hold to a minority opinion that not all is as it seems in climate science.
Variously, they argue that climate change is not happening (or it isn’t as severe as we’re told it is), and/or that it is happening but it has nothing to do with human activity, and/or that the scientific orthodoxy is really just groupthink/counter-enlightenment propaganda/institutional capture by leftist scientists/scientific careerism.
The debates in this area can, of course, be quite heated. Each side has been ranging its favoured experts and arguments in tetchy exchanges for years. What’s fascinating is that it amounts to precisely the kind of thing that has come up in recent discussions here - an intra-elite debate, for which there is only so much space in a gatekept MSM, being carried on and maintained on a range of prominent and not-so-prominent blogs, which has ongoing implications in terms of its possible influence on public debate and policy. I’m not concerned here to take a position on global warming - I’m more interested in how it’s playing out on A-list blogs and prominent independent news spaces.
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