Examining the Relationship between Political Bloggers and the Mainstream Media

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is my brilliant PhD student Tim Highfield, whose interest is in what contribution blogging (by a wide variety of bloggers concerned with politics, the news, current events, and the reflection of such topics in specific fields of interest) makes to the overall mediasphere. Such bloggers may have a variety of points of focus, and while the ‘informing’ role of blogs has been stressed in the literature, this may not be their only function.

There is also an underlying question of how bloggers and journalists interrelate with one another – whether they are complementary to one another, whether the wider blogosphere provides a broader background discussion to mainstream media coverage, whether bloggers can act as gatewatchers highlighting and critiquing specific themes in the media. This positions bloggers as a second tier of the media, in the way that Herbert Gans foresaw such a second tier that feeds on and reanalyses first-tier media coverage. Against this stands the sort of rhetoric around blogs as a mere echo chamber which Andrew Keen has built his career around. There is some indication that blogs link to mainstream media content more than to other blogs – as a source of information, to critique the content, or to refer to specific sections on the mainstream media page (such as comments), too.

Tim’s project engages in a comparative study of the French and Australian political blogospheres, and finds that in both blogospheres a number of well-known mainstream media sites are very frequently cited (both domestic and international), along with other central sites such as Wikipedia and the video sites Dailymotion and YouTube. Around the time of Barack Obama’s inauguration, for example, such patterns were especially pronounced, perhaps because this was (for both countries) an international event for which source materials were necessarily prominent in domestic and international mainstream media.

Around key domestic events, more context-specific domestic sites appear as targets of links in political blogs – not least also to sites which orchestrate political campaigns in support of specific agendas; blogs also actively provide information and promote such campaigns, in other words. The extent to which such more specific domestic sites appear in the data also depends on the blogs’ take-up of particular political themes, though – in the case of the confected ‘utegate’ scandal, for example, which blogs were only tangentially interested in, only a bunch of mainstream media sites were linked to, mainly simply for information.

The difficult relationship between blogs and mainstream media was also highlighted by the recent ‘Grogsgate’ scandal in Australia, where the identity of an anonymous blogger (who happened to be a public servant) who had posted a strongly-worded influential critique of the mainstream media coverage of the Australian election was revealed after some time by a journalist writing for The Australian; the ‘unmasking’ of this blogger was claimed rather unconvincingly to be in the public interest, and caused a serious controversy.

So, overall, there is significant linking activity between blogs and mainstream media, but this linking does not necessarily imply support. Bloggers now take on particular roles of functions which may address the needs of specific interest groups, and this may fit Gans’s second-tier concept. Mainstream media still remain uncertain about how to deal with this relationship, and (certainly in Australia) still occasionally lash out against their competition.