Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist, author and blogger. He has recently published a book, The Blogging Revolution, which I have not yet had a chance to read, but I have listened to an ABC Fora podcast of its launch.
Loewenstein bemoaned the state of Australian media, citing the decline of Fairfax as an example. While not claiming to be a ‘blog evangelist’, he suggested the current void in investigative journalism could be filled by bloggers, or citizen media or network journalism.
While Loewenstein made the point that in Western media, bloggers tend to leach off mainstream news sources. In non-Western countries however, blogs often provide the only reliable source of news, and form an alternative to state-run media.
He used the quite horrific example of Egyptian police officers using video they had filmed of each other raping men in custody as a tool for intimidation. They would show it to those whom they were trying to coerce presumably. Bloggers in Egypt got hold of some of this footage and exposed the police’s brutal tactics, and forced the government to answer for this terrible behaviour.
