Vipul Ved Prakash <vipul@pobox.com> writes:
Free (commercial)speech for you (perhaps at our expense), but no free speech for us?
This is peculiar. Nobody seems to mind ads in Newspapers, printed magazines, web sites. That is unwanted stuff too, but now someone is paying for it. Thou many grounds :
1. If the guy has to pay for it, he'll do it in limits. 2. He must have selected the context carefully, so the ad is most prolly of some use to its audience 3. He'll tend to talk sense.
The advertizers in printed & broadcast media exercise a great deal of control over the content. E.g., a magazine that gets revenues from tobacco ads isn't likely to run a story about tobacco companies trying to addict kids. That's why you see more anti-tobacco content in broadcast media (who can't run tobacco ads) than in printed media. (And there are cross-ownership restrictions.) --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps