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.
I’m sure many of you have Andrew Landeryou’s “The Other Cheek” in your RSS readers. Those who do will have seen that over this weekend he’s been revealing a story about the Victorian Liberals that he’s calling “blog-gate“. The Sunday Age also wrote this story up today.
Two Liberal staffers, it seems, have been anonymously authoring a blog (now “disappeared”) called hewhostandsfornothing.blogspot.com which was critical of State Liberal Leader, Ted Baillieu. Their anonymity was shattered when the Liberal Party launched an investigation and found that their blog had been set up and maintained from computers at the Libs’ Victorian headquarters. The staffers responsible - Simon Morgan and John Osborn - were summarily sacked by the State Director, Julian Sheezel. There are suggestions (prinicipally from Landeryou) that as Morgan was Sheezel’s right hand man, he must have had some knowledge of the “dissident” blog.
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