Free speech for me - but you shut up
by Jeff OBryant
With so much information available to us (television, newspapers, magazines, the internet, cable) and our ability to access it nearly anywhere (in our homes, our cars, and anywhere we have cell phone service) we can make informed decisions based on wide variety factual information and various opinions. The left is terrified of this- as the more you know and understand about the world around you then the less likely you are to hold extreme leftist views.
City Journal included this opinion piece from Adam D. Thierer that examines this issue. In what he calls the Media Cornucopia, Thierer explains why and how the left threatens to stifle outlets that do not conform to their views.
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April 16th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
How silly: ignorance leads to liberalism.
No, if the left is “terrified” of anything it is the plutocracy the far-right keeps trying to foist on all of us.
Amy and David Goodman wrote in a 2005 article entitled Why Media Ownership Matters:
Six huge corporations now control the major U.S. media: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (FOX, HarperCollins, New York Post, Weekly Standard, TV Guide, DirecTV and 35 TV stations), General Electric (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Telemundo, Bravo, Universal Pictures and 28 TV stations), Time Warner (AOL, CNN, Warner Bros., Time and its 130-plus magazines), Disney (ABC, Disney Channel, ESPN, 10 TV and 72 radio stations), Viacom (CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, Simon & Schuster and 183 U.S. radio stations), and Bertelsmann (Random House and its more than 120 imprints worldwide, and Gruner + Jahr and its more than 110 magazines in 10 countries).
To put that into perspective, according to Media Reform Information Center, “In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S.”
Sounds to me as if a very small number of big businesses are in a greater than ever position to usurp a lot of control over the news we recieve.