Quis custodiet custodes?

Monica Attard has just taken over a tough job – hosting Media Watch. The previous host, Liz Jackson said “You are setting yourself up as the judge of your colleagues.” While it gave Monica second thoughts “Yeah, I did hesitate,” she became convinced:
At the end of the day, I think what convinced me was that I know how much more cautious we are as journalists when Media Watch is on,” she says. (SMH today)

Her last words on the subject were:
I am very mindful that the onus is upon me to be fair and right, all the time, and it’s a heavy burden.
But don’t worry Monica, we the bloggers, viewers, readers, whatever, are here to share that burden with you. Media Watch themselves have a sucky but apparently about to be upgraded, forum called Your Watch. It’s over-moderated for my taste, but Auntie does so get her knickers in a knot if the great unwashed run rampant. Then we have media bloggers like Tim Blair smacking journo’s around over the reports on anti Muslim cartoons (see my bloglet A Bloggers Responsibility) and and also organisations starting up like MediaBloggers.org (is there an Aussie one yet? if not, shall we start one? lemme know). Wiki does a great job of revealing plagiarists – see one or two bloglets ago.

All this talk of collaborative journalism reminds me of my first bloglet on this site – Steve Garfield videos a journo videoing him. When the journo says “stop interviewing me, I’m interviewing you, it doesn’t work that way” Steve responded with “Sorry. Now it does. We are the media, not just you.”

So, the answer to ‘quis custodiet custodes’ is: WE WILL!

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