kia orana, greetings,

Congratulations to the world bank for catching up with the rest of the world and identifying not just blogs but public opinion as essential to good governance!

Could not agree more about there being an "accountability gap."

Antonio identifyies what makes OhMyNews work in Korea - that it is a partnership between bloggers and media professionals - a true future model.

At the moment, however, public opinion is scattered far and wide over the internet.

What needs to happen next is an information partnership between media, NGOs, business and government - to identify and agree on issues of public concern - and provide links to a statutorily recognised 24.7 polling service to gauge public opinion.

Here in the Pacific Islands, we are dealing with fallout from the deportation of Russell Hunter, a publisher of the daily Fiji Sun newspaper, by the interim Bainimarama military regime.

Authortarian regimes have a very low threshold of pain when it comes to freedoms of speech!

Issues raised elsewhere here - by Sina particularly - point further to problems related to matching public opinion to governance priorities.

It is my belief that it is not so much a matter of work cycles or deadlines as resources. The World Bank has championed policies for the last decade or so that put ultimate faith in the powers of the free market. However, over the same timeframe, we have seen a dramatic loss in public broadcast journalists across the globe, and relentless culling of private newsrooms as well.

This at the very time as the virtually unlimted capacity of the internet has become open to more people than ever before - at the very time when we need information specialists like journalists most - free markets have decided that we need less information, not more.

Similar to the question posed in these forums - is public opinion always right - we need to ask the far more pertinent question - are free markets always right?

I suggest not. Not when they are aimed almost exclusively on second-by-second profits, rather than long term effects and causes.

For that, we need journalists, not sharebrokers.

As ye reap ...

jason brown
editor
avaiki news agency