Breaking the censorship of the Media Class Media Watch last night was alarmed that politicians can speak directly to people via the Internet, without being filtered by the media: Charles Feldman: in a world where there are now fewer checks and balances and I'm talking about journalistic checks and balances, the danger is that the politician's voice is then not examined and cross-examined as it ought to be by journalists... what they should do is govern, stick to the job of governing, and leave journalism to people who do journalism. A few problems here. First, there is not an either/or here: my strong suspicion is that people who read politicians on-line also read the take of journalists. This is normally praised as going directly to the source before trusting the spin. Second, journalists can't often be trusted to tell you straight what politicians are saying. Indeed, the examples Media Watch gives of Malcolm Turnbull using social media show him correcting hostile Fairfax spin. This is breaking the gatekeeper role not of dispassionate fact-checkers, but of Media Class ideologues. For instance, how many journalists have permitted a frank discussion of the weaknesses of global warming theory or the absence of proof of the "stolen generations"? True, Media Watch covered the first of these arguments - although host Jonathan Holmes" sympathy was clearly with Feldman, as you'd expect from the Media Class, defending its power and privileges, and blind to its bias. That blindness was most startlingly obvious in this part of the Media Watch report: That's one view that Laurie Oakes shares. The journalist's job, he's always believed, is to ask the questions, not to answer them. Laurie Oakes: a concentration on providing facts - simple unfiltered information - would be a real point of difference in the coming contest with the new kind of political journalists - the ones who'll be players in the political game reporting on themselves and using the media access that technology has given them to push their own political interests. â Laurie Oakes, Political Editor, Nine Network, Media Alliance Centenary Lecture, 29th November, 2012 Laurie Oakes is hoping â vainly, perhaps â that the mainstream media will see that fact-based reporting, not endless opining, is what it can do better than the blogosphere. But he, and I, both fear that it may be too late. "Too late" is one way of putting it. "Hypocrisy" is another. It seems to me that Oakes is actually demanding a monopoly by the Canberra press gallery on "endless opining," which he himself does, well, endlessly from a generally anti-Liberal perspective. Here is a list of some his recent columns: