Siege to the fourth power – week 3

Newspapers represented an affordable, timely effective way to inform people around shared ideas, with no doubt they are one of the fundamental elements in the cradle of illuminism and modern democracy. The printed media have so many qualities that helped to improve human’s society but they also have the characteristic to require expensive organizations and can struggle to run a profit, hence they may end up being centralized in few hands of powerful oligarchs. The independence and the plurality of newspaper as always been an important issue in modern democracies. Even long-time established newspapers have always been prone to be influenced by the shareholders, political parties, companies paying for advertisement and the government itself in the case of state-owned ones.

The printed medium quickly became a powerful tool to influence masses opinion, we can safely consider them to be the first mass-medium that has been consciously used by the power for political purposes. In the last century, they start referring to the cast of journalists and their editors as the "fourth power" of the state. If someone thinks that radios, televisions and new social media have eclipsed the old fashioned printed papers in their political influence role can quickly be disproven pointing at how radio and television are filled in their talk-shows whit traditional newspaper journalists, who act as opinionmakers and how most of the social media political interaction is based on the re-sharing of contents from television talk-shows and newspapers themself, in their new digital form.

We can safely say that social media per se don’t pose a substantial threat on the ability of newspapers (and their patrons) to exercise the traditional influence in political dynamics, but maybe something else does, the blogs.

Blogs just as the traditional press can consist in the production of political contents and ideas of various quality and any extraction. Blogs differ from newspapers because they are inexpensive if not free to make and distribute, they don’t require an equity or a complex structure, only one person, the blogger, is enough to run one. Therefore, a blog can be independent as much as the blogger is, and today distributed for free on the Internet as long if their content is considered worthy to be shared by the users, the most valuable contents can become “viral”.

The case for a free blog to generate political influence and change is something already happening. The most famous example of a political blog is probably www.beppegrillo.it started by Beppe Grillo, a famous Italian comedian, in 2005. From his blog, Beppe Grillo was able to start the V-day protest movement, and subsequently, the “5 Stars” political party, scoring a quite remarkable 32% in the last Italian election. Interestingly in the first years of the “5 Stars” member were not allowed to communicate in any traditional media but restricted by the only use of the Internet, this rule is not applied anymore.

In a time of disintermediation of the social texture, blogs represent one of the possible challenges of the political power of the traditional press.

 

References

1.    https://www.beppegrillo.it/