United They Blog

In this era when so many are growing more and more doubtful of what kind of news and information are coming out of everyday blogs, a new side of the issue has come into play. In Nepal, where a huge shift in governing power has taken place in the last few years, blogging has become the way to get hardcore news and information out to the country and the rest of the world. This sudden reliance should make the rest of us reconsider the usefulness of blogs in our culture.

According to a story in the Online Journalism Review, blogging has become the main source of news for the Nepalese people who have undergone an enormous shift with the takeover of King
Gyandendra who took power from Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba two years ago. At the beginning of the king's reign, almost all media outlets began to be censored and several journalists lost their jobs along the way. Reportedly, the editorial pages in the newspaper were filled with meager comments on the weather or were sometimes left completely blank. The only outlet left untainted by this censorship were the posts of the blogging community. The leading group in this area was the group blog, United We Blog, which released a potentially controversial photo of a radio journalist strumming a guitar on the street after his layoff. According to the World Desk Reference, this complete political control is still happening, but the blogs still seem to be free.

In our own country, we increasingly doubt the "tried and true" news sources for reasons of ownership, bias, etc. What I'm asking you to consider is the possibility that the everyday person with no political agenda or corporate funding could put out the best news. Hopefully we will never be under the same circumstances as the Nepalese people, but with the blogging medium becoming increasingly popular, I think it would be unwise to ignore it. After all, we are a country based on the right to free speech and we should also make it our duty that that speech is being heard. By regularly reading blogs, perhaps we could learn how to distinguish the correct news for ourselves and we may even find that the general public really has something to say.