Read all about it: is the newspaper losing its hold on public opinion?

Back in the olden days when people still had eccentric names like Gerald and Walter and croquet was an accepted and commonly practiced weekend pastime, the newspaper had a great degree of authority. Depending on which paper you read, you aligned yourself to that paper’s particular philosophy. It was easy: the Guardian readers sat contently in their corner of the pub with their continental largers and French dictionaries, while the Daily Mail readers quarreled outside in the street over headlines such as “Are Pregnant Mothers giving Britain’s Swans Cancer?”, or “Are Foxes Stealing the Identity of the Church?”. It was simple: your newspaper told you what to think, (not in a tyrannical North Korean way, but you get what I mean).

However, in recent years, as I’m sure you are aware, this brand spanking new contraption commonly known as the ‘internet’ has granted the general public with a voice with which to speak out against the authority of the media. The evolution of social networking sites and the blogosphere has empowered every Barry and Sally in the country the freedom to broadcast their opinion to the world, as well as read the opinions of their friends with comparable ease. This, I think we can agree, is a very good thing. No longer are we subservient to the opinions of an intellectual elite; we now have the freedom to think for ourselves.

In many respects, this spells bad news for publishers. Now that the general public has a medium through which to communicate freely and easily and thus form its own point of view more rapidly, the authority of newspapers over the common man’s point of view is waning. We now have access to a dazzling array of information, which in turn allows us to engender our own views according to our own rational principles, thus denying the power of the paper over our general world view.

This isn’t to say that the newspaper industry is some kind of enemy to the people. I read newspapers every day. But it is evident that journalists are losing their monopoly on deciding which stories constitute as ‘newsworthy’. The printed paper is becoming out of touch, which is a good and a bad thing, because although the freedom to choose empowers us as individuals, as a collective we may become disparate and divided. You may be saying that, as a society, we were always divided by opinion (see Guardian vs Daily mail analogy), but the danger is that, without a presiding voice to inform public opinion, it loses its more general cohesiveness.

This is why it’s a good thing that some papers have integrated themselves with the general public via their utilization of social networks as a means of publishing their articles. If anything, you could say that we are more united as a consequence of this, as the spread of news stories is elucidated by its ease of access on Facebook et al. It seems to me to be a good thing for us to be able to discuss news stories via the internet, as we become more widely informed regarding current affairs issues. Moreover, it eases communication between the general public and editors, which in turn deconstructs the outmoded boundaries of ‘us and them’.

But there is a duality to this issue, as I have discussed. Although many of us are sensible enough to allow our opinions to be informed by respected newspapers, there are many who see the internet as a liberation from such institutions, and in turn wish to isolate themselves from rationally formed views in exchange for more irrationally based perspectives built upon misinformation sourced from the deep dark corners of the interweb. You need only cast your minds back to the shootings in Norway last summer for an example of how our freedom to information can be grossly misused.

In short, all I wish to bring to mind is this question: can or should we as individuals be trusted to inform ourselves?