by Harry Windsor

Created on: January 30, 2009

There is a vital need for more independence and objectivity within the media but I am not sure that the Internet is necessarily helping. it is clear that the majority of 'old' media, newspapers, TV and radio, suffer from pressure from various directions which affects the way news is presented. In a capitalist, liberal-democratic society, a free press means, in practise, a commercial press, a press owned by large (often multi-national) companies which inevitably bring with them a range of views and interests which need to be protected.

The first of these is the interest of financial viability. Any media company must make enough money to continue business and almost always attempt to be as successful a business as possible. This in turn mens that the writers are in thrall to two hugely influential factors: the readers and advertising. A newspaper (or TV/radio show) must try and attract both the largest readership and the most lucrative advertising deals and then they must retain both these. The upshot is that often journalists will be encouraged or prevented from writing certain stories based on whether they would attract the public and whether it would put off your commercial sponsors and the political views they hold. As many have pointed out this means that journalists who are liable to report the radical or dissident stories will not survive or flourish in the media world so much as those who can adapt their journalistic output to suit these corporate interests.

The result of this is that the majority of the media, while seeming to offer a wide range of views, actually tends to present only a narrow cross-section of the news and views of the world. It has become a truism to say that he Internet is creating a paradigm shift in this aspect of the media. People can now write from home and publish content themselves writing and saying exactly what they want without feeling the need to pander to other interests. At first this would seem to have solved the problem mentioned above and created a truly free (and usually $free to) press. In some ways this has happened: there is more access to facts now than previously meaning that subjects that often may not have been reported are now a lot harder to disguise or hide. But in fact the sheer amount of information and opinion on the web becomes its downfall.

When anyone can write anything it creates a bigger responsibility for the reader to become his own editor - deciding which information is more important, what is or

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