We need to address the threat to humanity posed by the tsunami of unverifiable data, opinion, libel and vulgar abuse in new media. I know all the stuff about it being a tool of freedom and democracy, and I also know it has the capacity to destroy civil society and cause unimaginable suffering. Governments have a regulatory function in this regard, and they’re walking away from it because they’re afraid of appearing to be repressive.
Ironically today's
speech by Alan Crosbie at a
conference on media diversity is itself full of such unverifiable data and opinion. For a man who makes much of the credibility and reliability of newspapers, it is unfortunate that he repeats the
long since debunked claim that:
Those English riots, for example, were a new media generated phenomenon, a product of information going from pillar to post without mediation without being edited, without a quality check.
Also worth noting is the cognitive dissonance between page 3 (complaining about political interference in RTE) and page 4 (seeking licence fee payments for newspapers also). Read the whole thing for an insight into the views of the man behind a substantial chunk of the Irish media industry.
An awfully confused and meandering speech. Now if he was at the HuffPo, it would have been a crisp 200 words: "Top 5 reasons your tax money should support my newspaper"
ReplyDeleteIt is quite a lot of crap. The speech is actually so full of shit (sorry) that I couldn't read after the second page without getting angry. This man, like so many others, keeps living in another century, doesn't obviously know anything about Internet nor understand that independent bloggers can be as good in their field as independent markets in the world of gastronomy (referring to his comment "If it was food would you eat it?"). Of course I would, ye eejit...!
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