Electronic gatekeepers: Locking out the marketplace of ideas

The Hutchins Commission was concerned that the small minority of the people controlling the press as an instrument of mass communication could misuse their gatekeeping power. Due to new communication technologies the abundance of media outlets has increased choices available to the public far beyond anything commission members could have envisioned. This, in turn, has led to the development of a second layer of electronic gatekeepers between information originators and the public. The effect these electronic gatekeepers will have on the evolution of the press will be as great as, if not greater than, that of the human gatekeepers who were the commission's focus. This article suggests there will be an increasing equation of the public interest with what the public is interested in, a reduction in people's knowledge of public affairs and a decrease in the exposure of individuals to new ideas or ideas that contradict their existing beliefs. The article concludes by questioning whether government regulation is capable of addressing these concerns.     

The Measurement of Pure Negative Freedom

Examining the question of whether or how far freedom is measurable contributes to the analysis of the concept of freedom in two ways. First, it involves attempting to establish criteria for answering questions about 'how free' individuals or societies are. Secondly, it helps to show how far different definitions of freedom really conflict, in as much as those definitions are themselves motivated by intuitive extent-of-freedom assessments in the first place. Critics of the 'pure negative' conception of freedom (freedom as the absence of purely physical impediments to action) have argued either that freedom is unmeasurable on such a conception, or that such a conception is counterintuitive, because the measurements of freedom implied by it conflict with the intuitive comparisons which we normally make. Closer examinations of the nature of measurement and of the nature of act individuation show both ofthese criticisms to be ill founded.