Technology | 2009.04.16
Tim Montgomerie on the impact of blogging on Westminster-media relations
Cosy relationships between Westminster and the media will not survive the blogging era
The front page of yesterday\'s Guardian carried a warning from senior Labour figures that Gordon Brown would lose the general election if Downing Street did not clean up its act. The personal attacks by his adviser Damian McBride on David Cameron and George Osborne may have been successfully propagated if the blogger Guido Fawkes had not exposed the emails in which the smears were seeded.
Thanks to that exposure we have learned a lot more about McBride and Team Brown\'s briefing operation. Journalists fell over each other in the rush to tell the story. Most evocatively Jackie Ashley wrote about a "portly vulture" on Brown\'s shoulder , of whom he now wants us to believe he wasn\'t really aware. The prime minister\'s letters to those targeted are welcome, but, to use David Cameron\'s expression, Brown is treating voters as fools.
The coverage points to one of the main reasons why independent websites are growing at the expense of old-style Westminster journalism. The old media is willing to tell us that McBride\'s methods were well known, but that was kept secret from a public who were sometimes led to believe Labour spin had ended with the Blair premiership.
Relations between the press and politicians are kept sweet with offers of exclusives in return for good behaviour. The blogosphere is less willing to play by the old club\'s rules. The three popular blogs on the centre right - Guido Fawkes , Iain Dale\'s Diary and my own, ConservativeHome - work because they are independently financed and rely on intelligence from their readers.
Looking at these blogs\' success, the Labour leadership failed to appreciate the importance of their independence. They are treated seriously because they tell the truth as they see it. I have never been afraid to critique the Cameron project - and I have never been marginalised as a result of that. The Brown circle didn\'t want constructive criticism. They wanted a new vehicle for top-down attacks. Derek Draper\'s LabourList site, created in Labour\'s headquarters and at a lunch with Brown, was always going to have a credibility problem.
It is true the new media cannot yet succeed without the traditional media\'s co-operation. Guido did not publish McBride\'s emails on his blog but handed them to Sunday newspapers. The citizen journalists who exposed alleged police brutality on their cameras needed this newspaper to bring popular attention to the assault on Ian Tomlinson.
But the traditional media should not see this need for co-operation as a reason for complacency. This is just the start of the web\'s political impact. My own blog reaches 10,000 people and the blog costs me just 50p a day to run. If the economics of blogging has ended the monopoly of comment, other monopolies are likely to end soon too.
Mainstream political parties will also have to become much more responsive to public opinion. Chained to donations from big business and big unions they do not have the incentive to build US-style internet-based grassroots. If that distance from voters persists, it will create a gap for new parties to emerge.
It is said the short-term impact of new technology tends to be overestimated and the long-term underestimated. In terms of investing in the web, Britain\'s major parties are unprepared for the revolutionary forces that will produce a massive dispersal of political power.
• Tim Montgomerie is editor of ConservativeHome.com
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]rlist-cameron-osborne-blogging
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