I highly recommend this excerpt as food for thought, bottom of page 4 - page 5:
"Political candidates' campaign discourse provides more information about issues than print or electronic news media. There are several explanation for this finding. First, news reporting tends to concentrate on the 'horse race' aspects of the campaign: Who is ahead in the polls? Who is running the campaign? Which states are being contested by the campaigns? Will the candidates attack one another? Who will be included in the presidential debates? The answers to these questions may be news, but they simply do not help voters decide which candidate should be elected president...
From January through October of 1980, CBS and UPI devoted 65 percent of their coverage to the horse race, 26 percent to issues, and 10 percent to candidates...
A second reason why voters cannot rely on the news media for policy information is that campaign news is only one story among many. The network news, for example, is a half hour long, but subtracting commercials, stories on non-campaign topics, and horse-race coverage leaves little time to explain the candidates' opposing views on policy questions. Particularly in the latter phases of a campaign, political ads, presidential debates, and other message forms provide more issue information to viewers than the news media...
To make matters worse, there may be a trend toward less and less coverage. The length of a typical political news story decreased by about 20 percent and the number of political news stories dropped by 20 percent from 1968 to 1988...average nightly news coverage of the campaign in 1996 was 12.3 minutes, down from 24.6 minutes in 1992...Furthermore, the news media have a tendency to offer short sound bites from candidates instead of thoughtful and extended consideration of issues...in 1968, the average quotation from candidates in the news was 43 seconds long. After 20 years, candidate quotations had shrunk to a mere 9 seconds...this figure had dropped to 8.2 seconds in 1996."
There's some level of value in having some barrier to competition, it discourages the apathetic and very casual participant and encourages a higher signal:noise ratio in the discussion discussion.
Well, at least in my opinion. :)
Ie, it's legal in practice for government officials to leak to Punch Sulzberger, but not to Julian Assange. This makes it very hard for the latter to start his own competing "WP: Reliable Source." (Just how do I become WP:Reliable anyway? Or how do I lose the privilege, if I abuse it?)
You could fix this hole by enacting a media equivalent of the SEC's Reg FD: the government must release all information to everyone at the same time. Short of this, the mainstream press is best considered as a government organ - almost every story is the product of privileged information which leaves the journalist captive to his "source." If he writes the wrong thing, the source stops sourcing and the journalist's career may well be over.
More broadly, those who attribute SOPA and the like solely to electoral corruption are seeing the moon but not the sun. Corporate bribes are certainly one form of institutional power in the American system, but not the only form or even the strongest. In most areas, in fact, there's a permanent war between unaccountable corporate bribery and unaccountable bureaucratic tyranny.
What makes SOPA and the IPR area so awful is that the lobbyists and bureaucrats are both on the evil side. Certainly no one's bribing the State Department to twist Spain's arm on IPR legislation. State doesn't need or accept Hollywood's campaign contributions - it's a permanent agency.
That changed immensely as we entered the radio age, where extremely expensive equipment was required to broadcast and there was some competition for a limited spectrum of airwaves. No longer could one semi-wealthy backer get a viewpoint published; it now took some very serious capital and/or investment only available by forming large amalgamations of wealthy people (or having a SERIOUSLY large backer on par with Rockefeller or other barons), and even if you got that together, you had to file requests for airspace which the government does exactly distribute loosely or quickly. The problem was exacerbated even further as television took over and expensive cameras, lights, and other equipment became necessary to produce a piece with equivalent credibility.
The internet has restored the equivalence and access of publication that existed in the days of paper and taken it further than it ever existed before; now there is almost no barrier to entry whatsoever to publish something across the whole world. Naturally, the corporations and interests that thrived with an exclusive voice among the people are beginning to wane and they are going down kicking and screaming. We will see what is ultimately required to root them out entirely.
Just think what would have become of the revolution if Thomas Paine's Common Sense went unread because everyone was too busy watching TV broadcasted by what were indeed 4 separate entities, but entities all friendly to the Crown which had already allotted them privileges and protection, and entities which were in identical businesses and therefore shared the same legal interests.
I think we have been thoroughly manipulated the last 70-100 years or so and I believe that we are continually reaping the consequences of that manipulation. Thank God for the internet and the freedom to publish which it restored, and which makes it among the most important structures in the world today.