It was one of the most disturbing interviews that Kristy Warks recently conducted with Glenn Greenwald on BBC Newsnight. I checked myself several times during the interview whether I’m getting it or not. Is she challenging him because she actually knows how strong his journalistic backbone is, and how solid his arguments are? Is she playing the devil’s advocate to demonstrate that something is not right with our democratic checks and balances? Get real I thought, no, she didn’t. Sorry, Kirsty one can read your hostility in the expression of your face. It was just the momentum of reluctance to understand that BBC could be almost or even just like Fox News or similar flagships of ideological interventions disguised as news.
I didn’t think through the consequences until I just read Georg Diez’s column on Spiegel Online where he concludes that this way of journalism, as we witnessed on BBC seems like a self-destructive act of independent journalism whose economic foundation is tarnished anyway.
Is that a sub-concsious coup de grace for a sick horse, a Schumpeter-like economic destruction to pave the way for interventional entrepreneurship as we now witness by Bezos or Omidyar?
After The Guardian was literally physically attacked and forced to destroy their data I should have understood that Turkish immune-defect syndrome has somehow arrived in the UK. Until then I thought that oppression of media and self-controlled surrender was a specific symptom of a despotic-democracy that got even more unmasked during the Gezi movement in Turkey. However, there is obviously no immunity for granted.
As we know oppression leads to uprise and intervention, and it seems to me that this could be a turnaround situation for new journalistic ventures which are actually driven by social responsibility. May be another form of first becoming rich like Gates and Buffet, and then funding humanitarian foundations?
Omidyar, and may be Bezos could be fresh signs of a civilian entrepreneurship, backed up by learnings from a digitally driven, social-web economy, and I can see subtile signs from Turkey as well.