Tonight I am chairing an event hosted by the media analysis firm Editorial Intelligence (their events can be as good as ours but, as a business, they charge!). The subject is The Power of the Commentariat and more specifically a pamphlet with that name researched and written by Julia Hobsbawm and John Lloyd.

Based as it is on interviews with columnists and political insiders the research is largely anecdotal and the conclusions broad. Commentators generally claim neither to want nor to expect to have much impact beyond entertaining readers. However, politicians and their advisors say that columnists – particularly the most high profile and respected – can influence public opinion and decision makers.

Although newspaper readership is falling, many columnists are now bloggers and arguably the opinionated, iconoclastic tone of the political blogosphere represents the next stage of the ever expanding realm of opinion which has seen the number of national newsprint columnists rise from a handful thirty years ago to several hundred now.

Although I am a blogger I am no great fan of the opinion piece. In general, their one sidedness, polemical tone and overwhelming tendency to present politicians as self interested second-raters (something which of course distinguishes them from the selfless generous, socially transformative profession of commentators themselves), the tide of columns in daily newspapers contributes to the unhealthy atmosphere in which politicians find it ever harder to confront people with the difficult choices we face as a society.

My disillusionment with the commentariat (which has nothing at all to do with the fact that no one has ever offered me a regular column) was sealed when I developed an intellectual game based on reading the most opinionated columns.

The game is simply to read the column then consider your view. Then spend a few minutes constructing the best, equally opinionated, counter piece. Not only is it easy to do, but at the end of the process you will tend to find yourself now holding a diametrically different opinion.

Subject to even a cursory deconstruction columns reveal (and of course there are exceptions) not reality but the lens through which the columnist is viewing reality. And because we, their fickle readers, prefer to feel self righteous than challenged, that lens is generally one in which the poor reader is the blameless victim either of the venality or our rulers, or of some other class of citizens who are comfortingly described as being completely unlike us in their motives or interests.

What has arguably made the rise and rise of the commentator more pernicious is that over the last generation the profession has moved from being similar to a theatre critic – experienced, informed, authoritative, somewhat aloof – to being a rowdy audience, seeking to disrupt the performance on stage with catcalls and rotten tomatoes.

What matters less now is the weight and coherence of the opinion expressed more the capacity of the writers to whip up the rest of the audience – me or you – into a state of self righteous rage, booing the actors and demanding our money back.

I am chairing a panel of commentators tonight so may be it will be my turn to be thrown off stage.

I try to avoid political current affairs commentary on my blog – it is not as if there is a shortage of it. But I can’t resist commenting on my old Boss’s speech about the media.

I think it is brave – partly because he recognises the impact of New Labour’s spin machine but more so because any criticism of the media is bound to be met with fury by the media.

I agree with almost everything Tony Blair says, but I think he misses one important point.

He says that the big shifts that have made the relationship with politics worse are to do with the impact on the media of technology and the market, more specifically the emergence of real-time news, the explosion of new TV, radio and internet channels and the consequent fragmentation of the market.

This is true but the problem is not just to do with the media and the political classes, it is also to do with the nature of modern society.

When I went to work in Downing Street, I hoped to find out which of the classic views of the state that I had grown up with would prove to be true.

Would it be the Marxian view that the state in a capitalist society ends up serving the interests of the ruling class, or the new right view that a combination of public choice and producer capture means the state will see every challenge as an opportunity to extend its own size and power?

Or the liberal pluralist view of the state as holding the ring while competing interests in society battle it out for supremacy?

Rarely a day passed without compelling evidence for all three views. And I noticed something else, not just politicians trying to reconcile interests in different groups but also confronting conflicting interests within the same people.

This is nothing new; voters have long expressed a simultaneous preference for lower taxes and better resourced public services. But, as the world has become more complex and as we have become less deferential, the need for us to acknowledge the tensions between our interests and desires has arguably become more acute.

In more and more areas it can feel like people demand incompatible outcomes: cheap flights and action against climate change; affordable housing and protecting every inch of countryside; low inflation and enough service workers but a crack down on immigration; less centralisation of power and guarantees of uniform service standards; tough action against security threats and the extension of human rights.

It is the job of policy makers and politicians to find ways through these dichotomies but this can only be done if citizens are posing problems which they are willing to see solved.

It is in this more challenging context that the destructive relationship described by Blair becomes so much more damaging.

The media help people deny that these are real dilemmas and that their resolution is as much a matter of our own behaviour as it is of the skills of politicians.

Instead the media has become a disorganised conspiracy to maintain the population in a perpetual state of self-righteous rage.

At a time when new challenges in our world and our lives mean politicians and citizens need a richer relationship than ever before the nature of the modern media help to ensure that it is more impoverished.

This is why a grown up discussion with the media and the development of new, more balanced and discursive online forums is an important part of a pro-social strategy.