Peter Mandelson, one of Tony Blair’s two main practitioners of media management, worries that Internet freedom is undermining “responsible” journalism, in a letter to the Financial Times.

[L]et us be under no illusion: how we come to grips with the fact that the internet is giving public access to a flood of uncorroborated, undigested and unmediated “news”, all in the name of free speech, is becoming one of the defining issues of the 21st century. In my evidence to the Leveson inquiry I described this as a runaway train hurtling down the track towards us with no one in control.

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[T]he bigger question is how the domestic media market can be made economic and subject to any form of regulation in an era when, a click away, there is access to information that respects no national boundaries and the laws of no single national parliament or the basic standards of conventional journalism.

The point is that the printed product now plays second fiddle to digital content. Newspaper revenues are competing not just with each other but against the social media, Facebook and Google, with the entire English-speaking world providing the marketplace.

If regulation of content is going to have a future, is this where it will have to go? You just have to ask the question to realise what a mammoth job the Leveson inquiry has on its hands. — Lord Mandelson, letter to the Financial Times

Via Guido Fawkes.