The voices of mainstream mediocrity are tipping

Sir Humphrey rightly slags off the pretentious twats at the clearly mis-named Fighting Talk blog for bitching about not being noticed.

The poor dears are giving up, and they're having a swipe at the whole blogosphere on the way - according to these blowhards, blogs are "only water wings for playing in the shallow end of the media pool. To plagurise [sic] a radio station whose attitude sums up the pigheaded arrogance out here; all blogs are shit." To plagiarise a well-known ad: Yeah right.

But as the boys pack up and jump from the well-deserved anonymity of their blog ('If you write as good as you talk no-one reads you' - Lou Reed) to the well-deserved mediocrity of the mainstream, we bloggers who can write continue to be read. Seems to me there are just two things to be said on this topic:

The first is a personal comment. As a good friend would say in moments like this: You're not being read, I am. Bite me.

The second is that mediocrity is not enough. The boys might be a bit premature in their jump into mainstream media punditry, but at least their mediocrity will be at home there. In an irony that is hopefully not least even on these would-be pundits, some commentators are begining to notice that the mediocre Big Media organisations are losing their audiences to the very alternatives Un-Fighting Talk are so condescendingly dismissing. "Big Media have their faults -- chiefly laziness, political groupthink, and a tendency to condescend to their audiences -- and those are starting to cost them," says one commentator here, and he suggests that we might be near a media 'tipping point' in which blogs and alternative media come out on top.

The reason? Says columnist Jim Bennett, "What is going on with journalism today is akin to what happened to the Church during the Reformation. Thanks to a technological revolution (movable type then, the Internet and talk radio now), power once concentrated in the hands of a few has been redistributed into the hands of the many." Perhaps that's what really annoys the non-fighting Fighting Talkers, just as it did the Church - with power in many more hands it's much, much harder to manufacture consent.

The lesson for the voices of mediocrity is that they should never take the status quo for granted. Now that is fighting talk.