Taking a look at my desk here at DG Comm, I can see that not much has changed since my days as an editor on European desk at a press agency. My day usually started by leafing through The Financial Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Le Monde, the newspaper institutions that are more often than not the mouthpieces of the political and economic elite not necessarily only in their respective countries, but Europe-wide. It was always comforting to know that you had your finger on the pulse of Europe, however presumptuous that might have sounded.

Catering to the elite

As I write these lines, I have my copy of the FT open on the comments section, there’s the latest European Voice somewhere in the drawer, not to mention The Economist on my bedside table, ready to lull me to sleep. To all those that warn about the threats that concentration of media ownership poses for the diversity of ideas in European public space, this surely sounds as an anathema. All of the above mentioned newspapers are namely published by Pearson, a UK media company, their target public being business and political types; it’s therefore not surprising that by and large they all toe the business-friendly editorial line.

They might not seem as such, but fiscal policy, derivatives regulation and bankers’ bonuses are politically highly charged issues in times of economic crisis. So it is particularly dangerous for a professional involved in these issues, either as a politician, journalist or a PR person, to have his views about the economic policy shaped by a very limited number of potentially biased sources.

Who sells what to whom?

As one cogent summary of Edward S. Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s classic text, Manufacturing consent, has it:

“It is clear that newspapers are not primarily in the business of selling a product to readers – they are in the business of selling wealthy audiences to advertisers. It is not just “that stories should increase readership or audience” – they should sell the right readership to the right advertisers.”

As a former editor-in-chief of a small niche newspaper, I can only attest to the accuracy of this analysis. Media content is consciously being produced in such a way as to set up a supportive environment for advertisers whose money pays the wages.

Taking the Wikipedia definition of biodiversity, “the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem … often used as a measure of the health of biological systems”, we may safely conclude that European public space is not very well served by a relatively small number of influential media having a limited scope of views on offer.

Blogs to the rescue

Luckily, however, world wide web (WWW) is another ecosystem altogether. Although democratic to a fault, giving just anybody a chance to speak his or her mind on anything and then publish it for everybody to see, a number of high-quality blogs have undermined the traditional media by offering a wider array of opinions that run counter to those promoted in the mainstream. Take the debt problems plaguing the European economy.

Taking their cue from textbook economics, all European governments are engaged in deficit cutting that is supposed to lay foundations for stronger growth in the future. The majority of pundits and journalists see this as a painful but necessary belt-tightening. But not the blogosphere.

The roll call

Here’s where the blogs come in. They allow economists such as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman to provide up-to-date commentary of economic developments that does not really fit into the business pages of a newspaper. They allow senior officials such as former chief economist of the IMF Simon Johnson to air unorthodox views about economic policy that hardly feature in mainstream coverage of economic issues. And then there are Cassandras (Edward Hugh’s EuroWatch, for example) who forecast the troubles the eurozone now finds itself mired in when mainstream media still applauded the EU for its dexterity to avoid the American-style financial meltdown.

But something certainly has changed since I was churning out agency news a couple of years ago. For me, the blogosphere has taken over from elite media as the provider of high-quality analysis of economic issues. It is always very interesting to contrast the latter with newspaper columns as it allows one to tease out hidden assumptions that govern the media construction of reality. At a time when debates rage about who is going to foot the bill of the crisis, bankers or taxpayers, blogs are becoming all the more important.