The reaction to Number 10’s Clarkson video is an interesting example of the no-win situation for Governments in trying to vary the ways in which they interact with people.

For those who hadn’t seen it, there was a petition on the Downing Street site to ‘make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister’. This was, as you can tell, a joke petition (or put forward by someone without much knowledge of the British constitution).

So Number 10 put forward a joke response on YouTube - nothing extravagant, just some stock footage banged together in iMovie or something similar. It’s not going to win the Golden Rose of Montreux, but it’s a jokey response to a jokey petition. Fair enough for a slow August, you might think.

But what is the media story? An attack on the Government by the opposition, for ‘wasting public money’ on producing the response.

No wonder Governments get nervy and defensive about new methods of communications.

I’m in New York at the moment - and, though I haven’t been watching TV much, I’ve caught a couple of campaign ads.

I’m also enjoying the paper version of the New York Times - although all the content is online, I’m still enough of a fogey to prefer dead tree for reading on the subway.

Yesterday’s edition had two interesting articles on how US TV is trying to handle young and engaged voters.

Here’s an article on how the networks are trying to reach young people who don’t watch the evening news (average viewer age: 60+) but are still interested in politics.

Meanwhile, SaysMe.tv is offering people 25-second “my say” slots on cable for $6 and up. Not sure how that interplays with what political advertising rules there are in the US.

Not much of a story in national terms, perhaps, but a lot of local newspaper websites are about to get better. Roy Greenslade reports that Newsquest, who own a slew of regional and local titles, including our own Brighton Argus, are rolling out a new website design, shown here at the Lancashire Telegraph.

From a democratic debate point of view, the websites are a step forward because they require registration to comment on articles. This should help (a little) to push discussion away from the race-baiting, identity spoofing and insults that characterise the Argus forums at the moment.

Farhad Manjoo, author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post Fact Society, is the guest on the WELL’s open discussion conference Inkwell.vue at the moment. Here’s an extract from his introductory post:

For many Americans, on many issues, objectivity has been supplanted by subjectivity. In my subtitle, I call this the “post-fact” society.

But why? Let me summarize my thesis. New technology has given us more information than ever seemed believable. Think about where you get your news — not just newspapers and network TV, but also blogs, cable news, talk radio, podcasts, etc., all these rich forms of media that we’d never dreamed of three decades ago. We also have more power of that information than we once did. With tools like iPods, Digg, blog networks, and other new mechanisms, now we can easily pick and choose our media.

There’s something wonderful about this new freedom; we’re no longer reliant on an institutional media for our facts about the world. But the shift also creates a problem. We humans have an innate preference to seek out information that confirms our worldview. That’s just how our brains work: If given a chance, we’ll avoid news facts that we don’t like.

Digital technology allows us to indulge those human desires better than we could in the past. On the Web, television, radio, and all manner of new devices, today you can watch, listen to, and read what
you want, whenever you want; seek out and discuss, in exhaustive and insular detail, the kind of news that pleases you; and pursue your political or social or scientific theories, whether sophisticated or naive, extremist or banal, grounded in reality or completely insane.

In this clip, near the start, it’s interesting - and reflective of current attitudes in the media - to see Andrew Neill mocking and shouting down an MP who tries to defend his colleagues against a viewer’s accusation that MPs only ever turn up for PM’s Questions.

Roy Greenslade writes in his blog today about the consequences of blogging for journalism, saying that he is coming round to the view that blogging will be the end of the traditional news media, rather than merely an adjunct to it. I wish I could be as confident as he seems to be that

the digital revolution is … bloodless, and democracy is at its heart

but it’s an interesting piece, nonetheless.

Commenting on the Personal Democracy Forum, currently underway, Eve Fairbanks at the New Republic complains that the social structure of the Internet has

atomized people, providing an outlet for venting frustrations without actually requiring people to get out of their chairs and start doing anything about their grievances.

For those looking for commentary on the American election from a centre-left perspective, Will Straw is writing a regular column at Progress Online.

Martin Kettle writes in the Guardian about the perceived and real political power of newspapers.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald discusses the motivations of web journalists and sites like The Politico. In summary, the answer is ‘they all love attention and ad revenue’ but that doesn’t do justice to the article, or the supporting evidence.