The former Conservative party leader, Iain Duncan Smith, has rightly drawn admiring comments for an excellent article he wrote in the Guardian last weekend about the far-reaching political implications of blogging. He needed to spell this out to a British readership because, unlike in the US, blogging has not yet caught fire in sleepy little Britain (we're always about a decade behind our transatlantic cousins in social trends). As Duncan Smith observed, blogging democratises the national conversation by providing an alternative discourse to the world view of the left, which the mainstream media (MSM) regards as the neutral middle ground. This warped perception means not only that it presents news through a distorting prism, but that by definition it cannot acknowledge that it is distorted, thus creating a closed thought process. This phenomenon is what leaves the BBC, in particular, unable to fulfil its public service obligation to objectivity and fairness.

After pointing out how the blogosphere brought down two big names in American journalism, Dan Rather of CBS and Eason Jordan of CNN, by pursuing the story about their corrupted journalistic ethics when the MSM chose to ignore it, Duncan Smith observed:

'...the blogosphere will become a force in Britain, and it could ignite many new forces of conservatism. The internet's automatic level playing field gives conservatives opportunities that mainstream media have often denied them. An online community of bloggers performs the same function as yesteryear's town meetings. Through the tradition of town hall meetings, officials were held to account by local people. Blogger communities are going to be much more powerful. They will draw together not only local people but patients who have waited and waited for NHS care. They will organise parents of disabled children who oppose Labour's closure of special-needs schools and evangelical Christians who see their beliefs caricatured by ignorant commentators.

'All this should put the fear of God into the metropolitan elites. For years there have been widening gaps between the governing class and the governed and between the publicly funded broadcasters and the broadcasted to. Until now voters, viewers and service users have not had easy mechanisms by which to expose officialdom's errors and inefficiencies. But, because of the internet, the masses beyond the metropolitan fringe will soon be on the move. They will expose the lazy journalists who reduce every important public policy issue to how it affects opinion-poll ratings. Tired of being spoon-fed their politics, British voters will soon be calling virtual town hall meetings, and they will take a serious look at the messenger as well as the message. It's going to be very rough.'

Roll on that happy day, say I. But two other things are notable about this intelligent article. First, it was written by someone who has been written off as a failed Tory leader. The fact is that although he did indeed fail in that position, Duncan Smith has subsequently shown time and again that he gets it, over a range of issues, in ways that leave his Tory colleagues standing. He has understood, for example, that the territory on which new Labour is so very vulnerable is precisely that moral ground from which his pusillanimous Conservative colleagues run away screaming. He has understood that President Bush won power because of his staunch and consistent espousal of 'values' that chime with the mainstream -- the very values that so many Tory MPs foolishly believe they must publicly renounce. And now he has understood that the web has the power finally to topple not just individual journalists caught with their hands in the ethical till, but the whole wretched hegemony of insidious and civilisation-threatening views that has driven Britsh society off the rails.

The second interesting thing to note is where this article appeared -- in the Guardian, the very heartland of those views. This is surely because the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, is astute enough to grasp the nature of the gathering threat to the MSM. Word has it that he intends to use the opportunity afforded by the imminent radical redesign of the Guardian into a format somewhere between a tabloid and broadsheet in size to 'put the "r" back into reporting' -- in other words, to rid its news pages of their fabled prejudice and bias.

This is a bit like trying to turn Pravda into a paper of record. The attempt will be fascinating to watch. But whatever happens to the Guardian, the blogosphere will undoubtedly come to expose the systematic lies being told by the British media, as surely as it is doing across the pond.