Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

‘That Balance’ and the New World Information Order 201
nologies, doubly vulnerable. The arrival of RealAudio in 1995 left the
world’s traditional radio industry, weighed down by nearly a century
of investment, limited bandwidth and, in many countries, onerous
regulation, and just beginning to come to terms with the digital age,
equally handicapped. The age of the personal radio station had
arrived abruptly and, it seemed, universally.
Many of the stories published and broadcast in the traditional
media which seek to panic their audiences about the Internet are
clearly just that: panics. ‘Journalism has failed in a major and
shameful way to live up to its obligation to inform citizens about
that which we need to know in order to remain a democracy. All this
porno on the Internet, all these stupid scare stories about hackers
and pedophiles and no explanation of the winners and losers in the
telecommunications deregulation.’ 32 The winners, in Howard
Rheingold’s argument, are plainly the global media cartel who, as
they see it, will eventually have Internet 2 fall to them as well as
most of the web. The archetypal bogus scare story, derived from a
study in a law journal, appeared as a cover story on Time magazine
in 1995. ‘Cyberporn’ by Marty Rimm claimed that more than 80 per
cent of Usenet discussion groups posted pornographic images. 33 The
purported university study about this massive preponderance of
pornography on the web was rapidly discredited by a campaign
organised from The Well online service. The statistics that claimed to
underpin the study and which comprised the main evidence
presented by Senator James Exon in his proposal for the
Communications Decency Act in the USA proved to be entirely
bogus. It was merely one in a series of scares that continue to suggest
that the Internet needs to be regulated and restricted, that only
professional media organisations are to be trusted with their hands
on the ‘publish’ button.
Scares and the ‘popular demands’ for regulation that they inspire
are only one of the ruses used to marginalise independent web news
content providers. The mainstream listing directories tend to only list
those who form part of the cartel. The Drudge Report, for all its conservative
and Republican leanings, is rarely listed. The high bandwidth
networks designed to provide video on demand will not be configured
as a common carrier in the way the Internet was. It will never
feature Drudge and the many like him from a political spectrum
wider than any dreamt of by the mass media of an earlier age.