01 December 2009

A Third Choice

As the brief flurry of posts (well, by my standards) will probably indicate: I've revised the original plan for work-to-rule bloggery.

Why? Well, obviously, it's a big week and I'd have been mad to miss it.

But also because, while I hate thinking of posting as something I have to do, the fact is that this is a testing time for the Scottish blogosphere, and particularly the SNP end of it. Given some of the strident posts coming from all sorts of different places, it's not entirely unthinkable to suggest that a scramble for the heart (and maybe the soul) of nationalist bloggery is now on, and it's leaving us all vulnerable to any number of traps which we'll walk right into if we don't start looking where in blazes we are going.

Accordingly, socks need to be pulled up, realities need to be checked and if we have something - anything - that's remotely constructive to add, now is the time to do it. I'm back for now, and I will be writing as I prefer to do: to keep myself engaged with what's going on, and to offer my interpretation of events; to send the ideas out there and see what happens to them. No plots, no cliques, no rows, no agenda. Just me, my laptop and the news websites. As it has always been.

So I'll be getting myself out of this rut now. But as those few of you who have seen me try to get out of an armchair will attest, that might get a little bit hairy.

5 comments:

oldnat said...

Good to see you blogging, Will. I don't remember your ever having posted anything inappropriate. That some have done a "McBride" and had to go, shouldn't stop those who remember that they aren't talking to their mates down the pub!

Andrew Reeves said...

Will - your 4th birthday post, like Jeff's last night was very thought provoking.

I am pleased you haven't gone away and that you are going to continue.

Welcome back, although you never really went away.

Marian said...

Great to hear you are continuing blogging. What has happened is a reality check and its better it happened now several months before the general election than happening courtesy of a hostile media on the eve of the general election. There is time left for the independence supporting bloggers to up their game and for new ones to establish themselves. There is also still time for the SNP to get its act together and up its game too. Labour appear to be threat at the moment I am confident that they will wane again as the SNP start their general election campaign in earnest.

Anonymous said...

John Hartigan, the CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, labelled all bloggers and alternative media outlets as “political extremists”.

Hartigan went on to savagely dismiss blogs as,

“Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance......Bloggers don’t go to jail for their work. They simply aren’t held accountable like real reporters….It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights,” snarled Hartigan.

“In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It really is time this myth was blown apart......Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common.”

Put in the context of these rather sweeping generalisations, one can start to realise where Euan McColms, The News of the World's Scottish Political Editor's interest in blogging stems from and on a more sinister level the kind of resource that is being deployed against individuals in society that wish to speak out against politicians.

Hartigan doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that the mainstream media is always found wanting because they habitually lie about news events and spin stories to suit the demands of their corporate owners.

This is the very reason why blogs and alternative media outlets have become so popular and have eaten into the mainstream media’s audience share, because people are sick of being treated like idiots, sick of being lied to, and are desperately in search of the truth.

Indeed, Hartigan’s boss Rupert Murdoch confessed to the fact that his media empire tried to shape public opinion to support the war in Iraq In other words, Murdoch’s many prominent news outlets wantonly put out propaganda supporting the manufactured case for invasion.

Murdoch admitted to this while lamenting the corporate media’s “loss of power” to alternative media and Internet blogs, seemingly unaware of the fact that the two are directly connected.

Now who will step up to the plate to take on and expose these vested interests and their attack on citizen bloggers?

Ted Harvey said...

Signal to the fleet... "Will's back!"