Free Expression in the Age of the Internet

About this book

The great threat to free expression today, it has been argued, is not the power of government but rather the control and manipulation of information exercised by private industry: "Even in a democracy, even with all the late-twentieth-century panoply and paraphernalia of real-time world-wide communication (into every home), it is entirely possible to create a virtual screen of reverse reality between the great majority of all human beings alive on the planet and a small but powerful minority" (Childers, in Gerbner, Mowlana, and Schiller,1996, p. 176).