Crisis in Greece transfers credibility of newspapers to blogs
date
Nov 23, 2012
slug
2012-crisis-in-greece-transfers-credibility-of-newspapers-to-blogs
status
Published
tags
Crisis
Greece
blogs
media
transparency
type
Post
ogImage
summary
Crisis in Greece boosts credibility of anonymous blogs over traditional media as transparency declines.
Crises do not occur by chance and are not always caused by exclusively external pressures. Often, they point to a systemic failure or a generalized bankruptcy of the system's assumptions. In Greece, the media did not only economically bury itself, thanks to chaos in the financial system that is dismantling the State. The traditional media also began to be viewed with suspicion, even by businessmen and top executives of the local banking system, due to its bias. And so, in the vacuum left by the mix of incompetence, interest games, and economic decline, the Greek news scene began to see the strengthening of a marginal player, the blog.
Things become even more interesting to study because most of the blogs that are gaining space in the vacuum of journalistic quality and transparency are unsigned. Anonymity is the rule because the content of these blogs is largely fueled by journalists who still work in the mainstream media, but see many things not being published due to interests that guide - and indeed guide - the newspapers that depend on advertisers. Blogs like Fimotro and Press-GR have highly qualified readers. "You can't believe in any blog, because anonymity hides many people who want to take advantage, but blogs like Fimotro are usually excellent," an executive told the PBS website.
Despite the situation in Greece being much more serious (there are testimonies of shortages in some cities at certain times), the unevenness of the journalistic scene confirms a movement that puts pressure on the comfort that the mainstream media has always had - the power to veto or not what interests them. The most likely trend is that the mainstream media will continue to bleed for a while until they realize that they need to regain the transparency they publicly propose to avoid losing readers who no longer trust what is written. In this process, not a few publications will succumb, hostages of their own culture.
The economic crisis is a factor accelerating the process. Revenues decrease, the ability of large companies to compete with the guerrilla journalism that blogs like Fimotro do decreases, and usually the number of scandals that need to be disclosed increases (because rats do not lose their appetite when there is little food). The interesting thing about the Greek case is to confirm in practice a theory: the one that there is no "shortage" of quality journalism when big companies leave the scene. Good journalists and people capable of reporting facts accurately continue to exist. Moreover, even in "stable" situations, society already coexists with sensationalist journalistic scum like News of The World or Cidade Alerta. Trying to unconditionally link quality journalism to large companies is a con or self-deception.