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The freedom of speech is such an important thing, both for the private citizen and the media, that freedom for both are embedded in our first right in the bill of rights. The question stems from the problems of late with the media being completely biased to the more liberal side. This is not a problem of freedoms of speech, but a matter of equal share of the medium, not the media.

In the beginning of the radio era, there were literally thousands of people operating their own local radio stations. My grandfather was an avid HAM operator, for instance. My father still has his license and an old receiver set, an elegant 1940's style. Then, as time passed, it became more commercialized. This was a slower process where by the airwaves were bought up by news corporations, and ads were sold to cover these costs, as it was free to pick up the radio signals, so they couldn't charge the end user. This drove the smaller people out of the picture, forcing them to release their voice, and therefore their means of publishing their speech freely.

The same thing happened as the printed news began to conglomerate. Back when our country was rebelling and declaring its independence, it was as easy to start a newspaper as to go to your local printing press shop and have a few hundred papers printed, then to give them to a corner shack or paper boy to sell them. It's amazing for us today to see how many people had newspapers they were printing weekly or more often, when today there are so few. Usually a small town has one, while bigger communities may have a local one, and pick up the regional and state one. Even large cities like New York are limited to maybe a dozen newspapers, which is absurd when you consider the millions of people that live and work in that area.

Television went through the same constriction, though by then the same interests that had cornered the print markets, and a century and a half later, the radio waves, had a jump on television. There were, even with that leg up that the conglomerated media had, quite a few small, private television stations that operated for a decade after the release of TV's in the home. Now, however, we see so few as to be none. The large media has spent generations of time to buy up what ever resource comes along that they can report, entertain and control.

Now, with the advent of the internet, we have another fight on our hands, that my grandfather had when his radio operators license came to be, and he was limited and eventually

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