Today, as you doubtless know, is Blog Action Day, when the online community is encouraged to turn its attention to a particular issue of global importance. This year the theme chosen is poverty, which seems pretty apt, given the parlous state of the world economy. It also fits nicely with the fact that we are midway towards the 2015 target date for achieving the anti-poverty millennium development goals.
Yet when I was asked to take part in today's initiative, I was more than a little wary. There's something a bit uncomfortable about calling on everyone to concentrate on an issue for a day and then moving on glibly to the next one. The environment was last year's theme. Does that mean we sorted it out, then?
As I see it, the good thing about blogs and online spaces such as Comment is free is that they offer us, as readers, an opportunity to gain access to a far broader spread of specialists and other informed voices than we would otherwise enjoy. Unless you are prepared to subscribe to a large number of technical publications, at some personal expense, you are unlikely to have access to a fraction of the issues raised in the blogosphere.
The hard copy versions of the national newspapers tend to be based around their own columnists and the occasional offerings by high-profile politicians or cultural figures. Their online equivalents, by contrast, offer a far broader range of specialist writers – for free. Comments back from the wider community offer a further set of perspectives, as well as links through to other sources to compare and contrast.
This is particularly important when it comes to today's theme of poverty. Most media outlets have a host of in-house correspondents dedicated to reporting on business, economics and other aspects of wealth creation. Few have a single reporter dedicated to poverty or international development issues. This leads to regular misrepresentation in the media, where political correspondents often fail to apply the usual checks and balances to official statements simply because they do not have the expertise or the interest to spot dodgy claims.
Last month's international poverty summit in New York was a case in point. Rather than addressing the underlying reasons why the international community is failing to tackle global poverty, those media commentators which covered the summit at all were content to depoliticise it and simply record world leaders' statements of concern and renewed intent. The Guardian's own 16-page supplement on the summit was actually paid for by the British government, and suitably complimentary of it.
Similarly, Newsnight had planned a studio debate on the merits, or otherwise, of the world trade talks as they sought in vain to escape from crisis this July. In the end they replaced this with a live interview of British trade minister Gareth Thomas, which was a good opportunity to put him on the spot over the government's failure to honour Labour party commitments on trade policy. Yet the interview failed to challenge the government on a single point, and Thomas was allowed to get away scot-free.
The problem is symptomatic of a more general trend away from having specialists within the media, as Nick Davies has described in his account of the churnalism that characterises much of today's press coverage. Yet there's also a clear hierarchy that condemns issues such as poverty to a marginal status. Along with correspondents devoted to industrial relations, journalists with a specialist background in international development are an endangered species.
The same applies to broadcasting, if not more so. As shown in the International Broadcasting Trust's latest survey, international factual programming on the main four terrestrial channels has now reached its lowest level since the surveys started 20 years ago. Many of the programmes filmed in developing countries are devoted to wildlife, holidays or reality TV shows spiced up through being shot in exotic locations. Politics, development and environmental themes now represent a meagre 7% of all international factual programming on terrestrial TV.
This is where the online community comes into its own, as it can turn the political spotlight on such issues and question the establishment line. For this reason alone, today's blogging initiative is welcome. Raising the number of dissenting voices on an issue as important as global poverty can only be a good thing.
I do have one problem with blog action day, however. As well as giving time to take part in the blogging, the website encourages people to donate money – a day's earnings is the suggestion – to a good cause. As director of a charity that relies on such donations from the public, I have no quarrel with that.
Yet the official partner recommended for blog action day is the Global Fund to fight Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. This is one of the richest funds in the world, already supported by governments to the tune of over £6bn to date. Unless your daily earnings are up there with those of Bill Gates, who has given the fund over £250m, you might like to choose a charity (War on Want or any other) that needs your money more.
