Nicholas Jones 17 April 2008

It was modestly put but heartfelt nonetheless: bloggers believe that crap journalists are finally feeling the heat.

When a trio of celebrated bloggers were brought together by the Adam Smith Institute (16.4.2008) they were united in their belief that the collective strength of the new media was helping to start to improve the quality and accuracy of the main stream providers of news and information.

“Curbing the crap artists” was the ambitious claim of the organisers and each of the three speakers -- Tim Worstall, Guido Fawkes and Perry de Havilland -- had to explain why they believed the blogosphere could play its part in redefining the media, politicians and business.

Tim Worstall claimed an impressive tally of scalps and took great delight in having corrected even journalists as well known as Polly Toynbee and George Monbiot of the Guardian and Will Hutton of the Observer.

“Bloggers are taking the information which journalists such as these present to the public and then questioning it. Even if we only have a small audience for our blogs we are changing the world for the better because we are exposing the errors of the main stream media.”

“Bloggers are a vital part of an information revolution and collectively we will always be better informed than any one individual journalist writing a newspaper article. We know when a journalist has got it wrong and we can point that out. The market place of ideas will sift and find the truth and that is the value of bloggers to a broader society.”

Perry de Havilland (samizdata.net) thought the success of the new media was that it had changed the nature of information and the way it was handled. The impact on crap journalists, politicians and businesses was that it “makes the crap harder to hide” when they get it wrong.