I don't mind admitting I enjoyed myself yesterday on Sunday AM. The only other time I have been on the programme I did a paper review with Polly Toynbee and was extremely nervous. I remember locking swords with her on the Iraq war and her looking shocked that I should dare to disagree. Anyway, the point of this post is to draw your attention to a post by Oliver Kamm(blogger turned Times columnist) who thinks that Yasmin outargued me and that when she said that blogs are just a giant echo chamber and 'impoverish democracy' she was right.
Harry's Place comments: "So why does the rightwing Dale defend the messy but essentially democratic and egalitarian nature of the blogosphere while the ostensibly leftwing Alibhai-Brown sniffishly compares bloggers to 'bores in bars'?"
That question seems to me less important than the debaters' conclusions; Dale's are wrong and Ms Alibhai-Brown's right. There are good and bad blogs, but the medium overall impoverishes our democracy. So far from being "democratic and egalitarian", the proliferation of political blogs narrows the range of opinion presented in the public square, to the extent that blogs are taken seriously as an intermediary for debate.
So, is he right?
