The main danger of blogs is... Fran Vinall

The main danger of blogs is, of course, that they will replace conventional media as a source of entertainment or news. Critics fear that since blogs are more accessible and more widespread than the mainstream media, the public will stop relying on newspapers and magazines, and instead turn to blogs for their information. Truth be told, if this phenomena does occur, and there are many a problem in it doing so, would this really be a bad thing?

The key issue critics have with blogs is that they can be written by anyone, about anything. All well and good, when it comes to blogs like cake wrecks, showing funny pictures of professional cakes, or personal blogs about what you ate for lunch and what your favourite Beatles song is.

But this is not so good when it comes to things like politics. Blog writers are writing up their opinion on the fat cat world of politics, and their opinion is only ever one side of the story. Take, for instance, Etalkinghead’s directory of political blogs. The links are these: conservative, liberal, independent (of ideology,) religion, humour, etc. Basically, the reader can choose whichever side he or she agrees with and only peruse blogs on that topic, nodding and sipping tea over a blog instead of a newspaper. Journalists have a responsibility to be non-biased and present both sides of the story.

Well, that’d be nice anyway, wouldn’t it. The facts are though, that as the media becomes less of the voice of the people and more of the voice of Rupert Murdoch and a few other kingpins, it is becoming increasingly biased. I saw a news report a few months ago about the government cutting money spent on wildlife, or a shelter closing down, or something like that. The report was given with the news reader holding a baby wallaby, shoving it into the camera and pleading “what about poor Joey here??” This is hardly non-biased reporting. Newspapers have the same one-sided bent. A recent article about Qantas, published on Ninemsn reports “The spokesman told ninemsn the plan centred on growth and retaining jobs. However, he admitted that "no company can rule out job cuts",” implying the spokesmen had let this information slip and was ashamed to say it. It seems like minor wording, “admitted” as opposed to “said” or a number of other words, but the implications are there when perhaps they shouldn’t be. Blogs are in no way delving into new territory by having a biased slant

The other, more annoying, thing about blogs is that many of them are amateur written. This can be easily avoided however, by digging out the blogs that interest you and avoiding the rest. Blogs provide the public with a chance to both get their opinion out into the world, but also to read a wide variety of opinions and insight they wouldn’t have access to in the world of mainstream media. Blogs allow the knowledge of every user of the internet to be accessed – they are most definitely a good thing.