BLOG: Uproar over Jan Moir's Stephen Gately column shows the web is a great leveller

In the past, power and influence lay with those who controlled the expensive, gated portals of traditional media: TV, radio and the press. They set, controlled and influenced the nation's agenda - and hang the fact that it probably didn't fit with what the man on the Bootle omnibus was thinking.
That, as we know, is long dead. Bloggers such as Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale wield enormous influence, having given real voice to significant minority groups. Those same minorities can, when expressing themselves individually but in numbers, hold huge sway. It's democracy with a mouse.
The latest person on the receiving end of people-power, e-style, is Jan Moir, the Daily Mail columnist whose stunningly insensitive - some say hateful - comments about the death of Stephen Gately has set the internet a-fire with indignation.
Advertisers pulled their ads from around her column in double quick time following a deluge of complaints from readers and even the headline was changed, from 'Why there was nothing "natural" about Stephen Gately's death' to 'A strange, lonely and troubling death'.
Even the revised headline shows a staggering lack of understanding, not to say judgment. There was nothing strange about it: the poor fellow's lungs filled up with fluid, as can and does happen, essentially drowning him; he wasn't 'lonely' - he was in a long-term, stable relationship with his civil partner; and the only 'troubling' thing about it was that a talented, healthy young man died by dint of a natural quirk. It could - and does - happen to ordinary folk every day.
Ms Moir is now blaming an 'orchestrated campaign' as reason for the backlash, demonstrating that she has failed, utterly, to grasp the new age of enfranchisement. To miss this so completely is to disqualify herself as a commentator, surely?
There is one uplifting aspect to this story. The vast majority of comments left by Mail readers on-line showed that, even if the paper's columnists haven't, they've moved on. Amen to that.

Dougal Paver is managing director of Liverpool PR agency Paver Smith<