I’LL GET straight to the point: any attempt at regulating blogs would be doomed to failure from the start. And it’s a bonkers idea anyway.

But the prospect of it happening has been the blogosphere’s darkest nightmare for a very long time, and until now I’ve always considered it as something of a straw man. Unfortunately, it’s none other than Baroness Buscombe, chairperson of the Press Complaints Commission, who has raised this as a serious prospect.

According to Ian Burrell of The Independent:

She wants to examine the possibility that the PCC’s role should be extended to cover the blogosphere, which is becoming an increasing source of breaking news and boasts some of the media’s highest-profile commentators, such as the political bloggers Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes. Do readers of such sites, and people mentioned on them, deserve the same rights of redress that the PCC offers in respect of newspapers and their sites?

Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated,” Baroness Buscombe told me. “Is the reader of those blogs assuming that it’s news, and is [the blogosphere] the new newspapers? It’s a very interesting area and quite challenging.”

Look, if anyone in the UK regards a political blog as somewhere to pick up objective news and analysis, then they don’t deserve the protection of an “independent regulator”; they deserve to be force-fed every nutcase conspiracy theory and viscious smear going. If you want news, buy a newspaper, or visit a news organisation’s website. I’m a fan and a friend of Dale’s but even he wouldn’t pretend that he’s a source of objective political news and analysis.

The suggestion could only have been made by someone with absolutely no notion of what blogs are, and how and why they operate. My only consolation is that the suggestion hasn’t come from the government.

The Baroness says that the if the PPC wanted to consider bringing blogs under its remit, such a move “would involve discussion with the press industry, the public and bloggers (who would presumably have to volunteer to come beneath the PCC’s umbrella).”

Oh, dear me. Well, good luck with that, Baroness. I’ll be interested to see what you conclude. But, in common with most other bloggers worth their name, And another thing… will never come under the regulation of the PCC or anyone else.

This is what I had to say in April about the government’s previous attempt to regulate blogs.

UPDATE on Wednesday at 9.20 am: Okay, folks, just relax. Guido has done what I should have done before publishing the above and actually asked the PPC about their intentions blog-wise. Nothing to see here, apparently. No plans to regulate blogs. Well, okay, then….