Understanding Media Watchdog Blogs

Hamburg.
The second speaker in this session at ECREA 2010 is Tobias Eberwein, whose interest is in media watchdog blogs. This is part of a larger pan-European/Arab research project, MediaACT (media accountability and transparency), which is engaging in comparative research across 13 nations.

Media accountability means a number of things, but can be summed up as any non-state means of making media responsible to the public. This may include press councils, ombudspersons, media journalism, blogs, social network commentary, entertainment formats (like news critique shows), and others; some of these are institutionalised (and some of those are facing various institutional crises), while some operate from the grassroots but nonetheless can have significant impact.

In the European countries studied by the project, the UK and Germany are particularly strong on such means of media accountability, while such instruments are less developed in other nations. Media blogs are especially interesting (and prominent) in this regard, and this paper focusses on German media watchdog blogs (in both mainstream and alternative media).

Amongst the key findings from this is that in media criticism in the mainstream media, there is usually substantial reference to TV programmes (58% of media journalists in newspapers refer to TV content); media blogs are far more focussed on Internet content instead. Newspapers focus especially on the functional contexts, while blogs focus especially on structural contexts (media organisations, media economics, technical aspects of journalism) and comparatively neglect role or normative contexts of journalism, especially. Media reporting in the daily press has a more general focus, while media blogs are much more narrowly based in their criticism. Similarly, media blog postings follow a pattern of gatewatching – referring to and commenting on material which has already been published elsewhere, rather than engaging in original news gathering.

Media blogs can form an important counterpoint to mainstream media coverage of media issues, then – they cover some areas (especially online media) which are under-covered by conventional media journalism. However, traditional media journalism is more versatile than such media watchdog blogs in its coverage and framing of such stories. One cannot replace the other.