This article by Bruno Waterfield and the leaked EU report about the way the No campaign successfully mobilised public opinion via the Internet to bring Ireland reject the Lisbon Treaty are fascinating on many levels.

Note especially the Euro-lamenting that traditional media outlets are facing many new forms of competition and therefore serving up a less good product:

The main trend is that newsrooms have become victim to cost pressures and objectivity has been reduced…

Strange that. Or is it in fact the other way round, namely that the abysmal bias and patronising tone of so many former ‘top-down’ media outlets in fact have obliged people to look elsewhere for the facts and analysis they want?

And see this:

There is a shift away from the State news Radio and TV stations. This means that the quality of debate has suffered.

No! It’s improved: a far wider range of people get to have views heard. Democracy and all that. Maybe the quality of outcome has suffered, if (of course) one assumes that only pro-EU results are good. 

The EU’s existential problem is that it was designed in a different age for different purposes and now comes across as ponderous, rather elitist, over-manned and highly self-congratulatory.

Everything the anarchic Internet isn’t.