UK - Media can longer ignore bloggers

And that's a good thing.

This could well be remembered as a watershed week in media coverage of British politics, when John Prescott's career was brought crashing down by a self-styled internet 'anarcho-capitalist' named Paul Staines.

Staines - aka 'Guido Fawkes' - is the most in-your-face of Britain's new tribe of political bloggers. Alongside Iain Dale, a former Tory parliamentary candidate who helped to run David Davis's bid for the party leadership, he has led the way over the past week in churning out a battery of allegations about Prescott's political and private life.

The effect has been extraordinary. By the week's end, the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, was trading cyber-jibes with the blogging duo. Prescott's biographer Colin Brown wrote darkly in the Independent of a Tory-inspired online plot to bring down the deputy PM. And if there were any doubt that British political blogs had come of age, it was dispelled on two of the old-media preserves of political discourse: the BBC's Newsnight and Radio 4's Today Programme

Newsnight interviewed Dale about the Prezza blogs in mid-week. The next morning, Today's John Humphrys - taking his cue from allegations on Guido's blog - grilled Prescott about claims of further extramarital affairs.

Now, if we could just get the BBC to drop its left wing anti-American agenda.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------