Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

200 Online Journalism
and corporations the ability to censor large parts of the Internet,
would be deeply problematic for most responsible journalisms.
Speech is already rigorously controlled by the laws of libel and,
depending on national boundaries, other legal instruments. Its
further policing, more than the conduct of reporters, would clearly
have direct implications for the social beyond the limited domain of
the media, including the economy. The solution would necessarily
give the state direct access to all information on the Internet and, as
with the CDA, leave the law open to constant erosion as the definition
of subjective conditions such as ‘obscene’, ‘pornographic’,
‘degrading’ and ‘fascist’, all subject to semantic slippage from a
whole spectrum of cultural agents and mores, are endlessly debated.
The reporting of the Monica Lewinsky scandal would have been
reported under rather more restrictive conditions than the Christine
Keeler story was in the puritan Britain of the mid-twentieth century.
At present the issue of surveillance is most acute in large companies,
more than a quarter of which in America routinely read
employees’ email. While most of those companies seem to disclose
their privacy policies to employees the monitoring of such traffic has
implications for whistle-blowing and the exposure of corporate
crime as well as to the larger issue of how citizens keep themselves
informed.
Censorship or Constraint
The tendency by governments to restrict and curtail activity on the
web can be viewed in another light. The censorships targeted at web
publishers and free speech, if successful, could be of immense
commercial benefit to the global media establishment. At present,
when a Drudge or a SlashDot can attract a larger readership than the
Washington Post, The Times or Disney’s Go, there must be a great
incentive on the part of big media and its friends in government to
handicap the web’s upstarts in any way they can. The technology
itself might well eventually weed out such mavericks and newcomers
as Internet 2, with the massively expanded bandwidth required to
transmit full-featured streamed media, demands an equivalently
expanded entrance fee. That development will leave the traditional
press, already badly mauled by the new web providers in the loss of
their classified and display advertising, and without broadcast tech-