Thursday, March 12, 2009

The Great Free Speech Robbery

In the last half century, the media environment of the US and, following its example, much of the world has been transformed. Multinationals and ad agencies mold consciousness, hammering in certain messages and suppressing others. Global management of information by corporate overseers who supervise every step of the process now poses as great a threat to self-government as pollution does to the environment.


How did the US media lose their way, ultimately replacing a "free marketplace of ideas" with perception management by a handful of conglomerates? Actually, the danger was there from the start…


A five-part essay.


How Corporations Became People


New Players, Same Old Game


Total Exposure (or, how we gave up privacy and learned to love Big Brother)

Merger Madness


Paradoxes of the Information Age