Blogs are vital alternative media sources

By Caroline Kay
Financial Times Letters
Feb. 26, 2006

From Ms Caroline Kay.

Sir, Your article on blogs bears no resemblance whatever to the world I see when I go online ("Time for the last post", FT Weekend, February 18/19).

I have never visited a gossip blog at all. The blogs I visit are those whose contributors are lawyers, economists and other academics, political strategists, media people of various sorts and ordinary citizens representative of many other occupations.

Some of these people write well and some do not but the ones I read consistently have ideas that are worth thinking about - ideas that never would have seen the light of day if we were only allowed to read what the US corporate media have dished up for our entertainment.

No human can possibly absorb all the informational and disinformational material available to us now.

There is a huge advantage in having many eyeballs patrolling the sources of information, many minds with many varieties of experience free to express their thoughts in an open forum - discussion that is not chosen and/or edited by people whose living may depend on not offending the powerful.

Maybe since your reporter works for a non-American newspaper he is not familiar with how our media kowtow to powerful people, refusing to call them on their obvious lies and hypocrisies.

If we did not have blogs, we might never know about the latest assaults on truth, and we certainly would not know the details. We assuredly would not have the audio and video evidence.

None of us individually would have the resources to dig up the stories and the quotes from the past that often totally debunk what's being said currently.

Carolyn Kay,

Chicago, IL 60605, US