Thawing out the peaches

I ' ll conclude my discussion of freedom of speech with this. I don ' t know who first said it, but it ' s oft repeated, that freedom of the press pertains only to people who own one. Yeah, Blogger is free but I suspect I have many fewer readers than there are Fox News viewers. The vast majority of discourse in the metaphorical public square is mediated by for-profit corporations. Their main purpose is to make money, which they mostly do by selling eyeballs to advertisers. (Paid subscriptions are not generally a significant source of revenue for mass media, although they do matter for some special interest magazines.)Now,, you can certainly sell eyeballs to advertisers by appealing to an ideologically distinct market segment. That ' s what Fox News does, and to some extent MSNBC, although most TV news operations try to claim neutrality, which is in fact impossible but we won ' t go into that now. But those operations are all content producers. They completely control their content, which they also create. Granted, there ' s some latitude for non-employees who they interview, but they get to decide who those are and who to have back. The First Amendment matters to them only because it means the government can ' t tell them what to say. It doesn ' t give you any right whatsoever to appear on their shows or have your views represented.So-called social media like Twitter, however, are a different animal. Until the recent change of ownership, the managers ' job was to try to make ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs