Worth a read:
The whole McBride saga has been a fascinating study of the dance between bloggers, mainstream media and the centralising urge of government. I really must blog more about it when I have a little more time.
"The whole McBride saga has been a fascinating study of the dance between bloggers, mainstream media and the centralising urge of government." Hmm, yeah, kind of. The mainstream media's biggest role in this story appears to have been in making more of the story than was really there. Political animals discuss Westminster gossip shock! Pretty much the definition of dog bites man...
On the blogs side, all Paul Staines did was give a public airing to private gossip in a way that might not have been possible before teh interweb. In that sense, he's a poor man's Drudge Report. Whoever hacked or stumbled upon the private emails is a much more significant figure in this melodrama than the odious Guido.
And centralising urges? They're also a non-story in the sense that every government tries to maintain an iron grip from the centre. When a party has more than a decade in power, however, the grip slips - for a variety of reasons - and their attempts to stay on top do start to look pretty desperate. We saw it with Thatcher and with Major.
And did you read Paddy Ashdown's account of his own smearing by the Tories in the Sunday Times? It ill behooves the party that brought in a specialist smear squad from the US - "The Nerds" - to complain overly about tittle tattle emanating from their rivals.
(Maybe I'm just getting old and tired of politics...)
I think you're misreading me, Richard. I'm certainly not making a (party) political point here. I just find it interesting that the government were going to use blogs to spread rumours about the opposition, it was a blogger that brought the story to the public attention - but that he still thought that he needed to take it to the mainstream press to get maximum attention for it.