Daniel Hannan on the Political Net

I’ve been hav­ing this on-going con­ver­sa­tion with my dad — old news man that he is — about the galac­tic reset going on in the print news media. This morn­ing, mom for­warded me this link to an op-ed from Daniel Han­nan in the Tele­graph. It’s an inter­est­ing read, illus­trat­ing in par­tic­u­lar that we are not alone, and that UK media are just as strapped as we are when it comes to cov­er­ing all the sto­ries that really need covering.

Twenty-four hours ago, I made a three-minute speech in the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, aimed at Gor­don Brown. I tipped off the BBC and some of the news­pa­per cor­re­spon­dents but, unsur­pris­ingly, they ignored me: I am, after all, sim­ply a back­bench MEP. When I woke up this morn­ing, my phone was clogged with texts, my email inbox with mes­sages. Overnight, the YouTube clip of my remarks had attracted over 36,000 hits. By today, it was the most watched video in Britain.

How did it hap­pen, in the absence of any media cov­er­age? The answer is that polit­i­cal reporters no longer get to decide what’s news.