Thursday, May 24, 2012

Forget Paxman - which Liberal Democrat Voice editor featured at Leveson yesterday?


Everybody's talking about Jeremy Paxman's evidence at Leveson yesterday, where he described how Piers Morgan explained to him at a lunch how to hack somebody's phone and how people would be very stupid not to set a code. He wasn't telling us anything that wasn't already in the public domain, though. Piers Morgan talked about that himself in the first instalment of his own memoirs, The Insider, as far back as 2004.

The really interesting stuff from a Liberal Democrat Voice point of view happened when Andrew Marr gave his evidence. He was talking about the authority and credibility of the political blogosphere. Top left on page 83 if you don't want to read the whole thing.
"You look around and a lot of the most influential highly respected political commentators aren't newspaper journalists, actually, they are bloggers. I'm thinking of people like Tim Montgomery on Conservativehome or Mr Pack on the Liberal website."
Well, actually, Mr Marr, it's Dr Pack, but we'll let that one pass seeing as you were so nice.

It got me wondering what our Mark has said about Andrew Marr over the years.

In January this year, when Marr interviewed Nick Clegg, Mark commented t hat he must have been bidding for the highest number of topics in one interview.

Marr's comments yesterday were a big change from Autumn 2010 when he described bloggers as "inadequate, male, pimpled and single." Mark reminded him at the time that most bloggers are in fact female.  Now that Marr's  admiring the genre, he might want to diversify his reading list. He can start with Jennie

It appears to me that seeing as Mark has been cited as one of the most respected political commentators in the country, it wouldn't be a bad idea for him to head along to Leveson himself, especially as he has his own, liberal, perspective on how the media should be reformed post Leveson.

In the meantime, I guess it's chocolate milk shakes all round....

4 comments:

Ellen said...

I missed that. I daren't start watching Leveson because I never get anything done.
Interesting comment about bloggers - a voice to be reckoned with indeed.

Jennie Rigg said...

LMAO the day old jug ears starts paying attention to ME is the day hell freezes over. I'm female, I'm Northern, and I'm very dismissive of the Westminster bubble. Three reasons right there for him to ignore me. And then there's my blog design choices, which clearly mark me out as "not a serious contender" to small-c conservatives and BBC journos...

Unknown said...

All of the above is certainly true - and all the more reason everybody should read you:-)

Jennie Rigg said...

As far as the Ghandi quote goes I riccochet between 1 and 2. I'm hoping to move onto 3 at some point before I die.

("first they ignore you. They they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win")

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