Caught in the net

Gstaad

One thing is certain, perception and reality sure are different, and we have the not-so-new peekaboo journalism of Rupert Murdoch to thank for it. The internet, of course, is the wild west of the Fourth Estate, but, thank God, I don’t know how to read it and even if I knew I wouldn’t. It is a dark new world. Slander for money, although no one really gets paid. Blogging, reading politically racy websites, texting by cellphone, it’s all Latin to the poor little Greek boy.

What it is is satisfying to the masses. Everyone now feels like a journalist, a profession that my father warned me against and even Charles Moore once admitted to me was one notch above that of child molester. (He was kidding, but not too much.) But there’s a problem. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of new bloggers the world over are playing at being hacks, yet have not managed to trigger the slightest change in the way the world is run. Especially in Arab and Third World countries. Two lady friends of mine, Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown, run two very successful websites, Huffingtonpost.com and Thedailybeast.com, reputed to be worth millions upon millions, yet I’m not sure anyone will pay, say, one million for either of them. It’s all still up in the air, as they say, and I include the greatest website of them all, Takimag.com, run by my own sweet little daughter, Lolly.

Now everyone feels they can have their say. If they’re not glued to their cellphones talking rubbish, they’re pounding away on their blogs, frenetically trying to have their opinions read by anyone, everyone, as long as their voices are heard, read, posted. BlackBerrys, Kindles, iPods, everyone is opining about everything, but I’m content to read my Speccie, my Telegraph, my Chronicle, my books, a couple of tabloids, Arnaud de Borchgrave and John Burns in the New York Times.