You are in:
- Archives » 2006 » December 2006
The Media Gap
Aren't the blogs meant to be the frivolous ones - while the mainstream media concentrates on serious, grown-up issues?
Then why are the blogs seething with discussion of Tony Blair's questioning by police as part of the Cash-for-Honours inquiry, while the newspapers bought into Labour's "Media Management" strategy hook, line and sinker, splashing their front covers with news of the report into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales?
Blair's people planned the PM's interview with the cops to coincide with the release of the Diana Report and news that hundreds of local Post Offices were to close. In another classic case of "burying bad news", the PM's questioning - a huge story on any other day - was drowned out by coverage of a death nearly a decade ago.
Even the Daily Mail, usually Blair's fiercest critic, went for even wilder fringes of the Diana conspiracy, dedicating its top story slot to "news" that Diana feared both she and Prince Charles' mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles were likely to be rubbed out by special forces so the Prince of Wales could marry their children's nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke!
Yes, there's a conspiracy out there if you want one: Why, on the day that the British Prime Minister is interviewed about selling peerages to supporters (the first time a PM has faced cops since 1928) does the press focus instead on Princess Diana?
