pgnewarkboy
TUG Member
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- Jun 10, 2005
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There has never been more freedom of the press than in our current world.
It used to be that unless you owned a printing press and the infrastructure to distribute your printed material, you were nothing more than a voice on a street corner. Under that system if you controlled the printing presses you controlled speech. That's why dictatorships the world over regarded printing presses as instruments of sedition and controlled closely who could own them and operate them.
With the internet anyone can publish. You don't need to be vetted by some news corporation, or have your material reworked or rewritten. You can say what you want and put it out there for people to read. It's a bit like going back to the days when most cities had 10 or more newspapers, all vying for attention, only even better.
But then the newspapers were all consolidated under the control of a handful of people. That, of course, was the so-called "golden age of journalism", where there was a handful of people who got to decide what was news and what was not news. It was a golden age because they had the gold and they made the rules.
Sorry but most people still get their news from TV. Also, we are not talking about government censorship. We are talking about the quality of journalism and corporste influence over the news which you reasily admit existed in the past. Despite the existence of the internet media consolidation is a fact. One of the arguments against sopa is that it will extend big corporate control to the internet. Surely somethingworth disscussing on the nightly news.