Why Blogs Matter

This past Sunday, we had dinner with a leading Indian advocate for economic liberalism.

We brought up the recent blog-protest against Musharraf's visit. Why wasn't there even one similar protesting view expressed in our traditional media, we asked? Surely other Indians, besides the protesting bloggers, disagreed with India's outreach to the Pakistani dictator? If so, where were their voices?

We then suggested that traditional media, particularly on foreign policy issues, smothers all opinion that dissents from the Government view. Thus, our media is hardly a place for reasoned debate; rather, it's a means for the Government, and its proxies, to shape public opinion. Perhaps blogs could fill this intellectual void, we speculated.

Our guest disagreed. The commercial media caters to the market, he argued, and prints/broadcasts content that sells. His implication was that our kind of hawkishness likely has no market in today's India. As for blogs becoming a place for debate, well, they have so little readership that they don't really matter.

He's likely right. Then, should serious bloggers just give up? We think not.

We hate to quote from a movie, much less a movie we've recently dismissed as being terrible(!), but there's a nugget of good in all things. In The Interpreter's climactic scene, the vicious dictator reads, at gunpoint, the following from his autobiography (written when he was still an honorable man):

It's hard to hear among the gunfire...But even the softest whisper can be heard when it tells the truth.

We think this is a pretty important point. Blogs may not (yet) have the megaphone the traditional media has, but as long as they have integrity, their whisper will find receptive ears.