at Tuesday, April 29, 2003 6:21 PM, Tim May <timcmay@got.net> was seen to say:
If the state has the authority to classify words as "marketing" or "news" or "propaganda," all is basically lost. It is difficult to define a particular piece of data as one of the three as an abstract. however, you *can* make the distinction between marketing/propaganda and news (although it is difficult) and the concept of *not* deliberately lieing for political or financial gain isn't really a hard one.
And "freedom of the press" is indeed limited to those with presses, except presses have long been a nonbarrier to speech, given the incredible low cost of mimeograph machines, offset printing, laser printing, and so on. And now we have the Net. *lol* Make two statements. put one of them on CNN, the BBC, and all the other "official" news outlets, broadcast it on the commerical tv/radio channels and internationally recognised print media take the other and do whatever else you want with it - publish it all over the web, copy off a few hundred (or thousand) sheets and hand them out in the street; set up a small radio station and broadcast it to your local neighbourhood, take a megaphone and shout it out in public places.
Which of the two will 98% of the public believe, and which will be derided as a crackpot theory (hint, the answer isn't "whichever is true") remember that more than half of americans are firmly convinced saddam was responsible for 9/11 - despite the media circus blaming it on OBL last year (and they will believe something else next year, when the US attacks yet another middle east country)