Virtually all the trends that matter are making a mockery of the industry's ritual incantations about the values and virtues of a free press in a free society.
During the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power.
I'm very much in support of the free press, but the free press ought to be educational and informative. And I believe they have fallen down recently on that.
I believe that one of the most important institutions in a democratic society is a free press.
The Iraqi Free Press, which did not exist 18 months ago because there was no such thing as the Iraqi Free Press, broke a story about the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, which could potentially turn out to be the largest scandal in history.
When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press - an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms - would be among the first to surrender.
One sad consequence of this is that people don't feel permitted to try understand Internet infrastructure, so I'm really grateful to groups like Free Press and other nonprofits who are trying to make the issue urgent and comprehensible. And Andre Blum's book Tubes is great on this topic.
Press freedom does not mean that the press should be above the law. While it's vital that a free press can tell truth to power, it is equally important that those in power can tell truth to the press.
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