Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

‘That Balance’ and the New World Information Order 207
We live in a dirty and dangerous world … There are some things
the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe
democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate
steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to
print what it knows. 38
Graham’s contradictory statement, at first sight quite breathtaking
coming from the executive who enabled the Watergate investigation,
is clearly articulated by one who regards herself as an insider. It
is a mindset that helped to compromise the press in the eyes of many
of its readers in the period after Vietnam and Watergate. By the time
the Post and most of the other news providers of the West came to
report the Gulf War it was generally understood that the capability
of the news media was, as Philip Hammond and Ed Herman have
characterised it, ‘degraded’. 39 Any claims for critical objectivity and
independence were paper-thin.
Such a degradation of the press effectively matches the work of
the most draconian regulation. The collateral loss of credibility
merely exacerbates the degradation until the press fails to serve any
useful social function other than the ‘orders for the day’ of totalitarian
regimes. As Bagdikian has pointed out, for the West this
becomes a clarion to fresh feats of consumption and little else.
As we have seen, the web mitigates against such collusions of the
press and power as well as any justification of it. Martin Bangemann,
a member of the European Commission in the 1990s, was the author
of the series of papers on the regulation of the Internet. He regarded
local solutions to this regulation by the world’s nations as pointless.
Problems with and evasions of such local legislation would be simply
effected by crossing national borders at a key stroke. The real effect of
such legislation would be to handicap electronic commerce in those
countries which enacted it, with the concomitant loss of jobs. A
better solution might have been the harmonisation of national laws;
however, ‘given the complexities of the question and given in particular
the number of countries with different laws and cultures, the
prospect of having clear rules in the form, for instance, of an international
treaty, at least in some reasonable time, is rather low’. 40
In partial agreement with Internet libertarians such as Barlow and
Kapor, Bangemann favoured a compromise based on an international
charter built around a range of principles and basic rules