"There has been a rush of fact-checking of recent comments made by Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, but does this mean the traditional media’s obsession with objectivity and the “view from nowhere” has changed? Not really — which is why more alternative sources are necessary."

"There’s been a lot of sound and fury over Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s speech at the party’s national convention on Wednesday, and how it was riddled with inaccuracies, or what some prefer to call “demonstrably misleading assertions.” Is it news that a politician on the campaign trail would shade the truth, or use underhanded rhetorical tactics? Probably not, but the Ryan speech touched off a powder keg of emotion around the role that the traditional press plays in such acts of political theater, and whether the mainstream media deliberately downplays those kinds of falsehoods. If nothing else, such incidents show that the process of fact-checking and claim-debunking has to be distributed as broadly as possible — particularly to non-traditional sources."

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Cartoonists have skewered our politicians in the pages of newspapers for generations. Can they survive in a digital age?

"Yet this is the paradox of cartooning: a few dozen people make a very good living from it, but when eventually they hang up their nibs, will they be replaced? Print sales are falling; the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations show the daily newspaper market contracted 7.79 per cent in the past year. Do cartoons work divorced from the topography of the newspaper page? Will they bring enough “eyeballs” to advertisers to justify their existence on the internet?"

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