Web blogs are the voice of the majority of the people, the Vox Populi . These days free expression of the vox populi is under assault from myriad megalomaniacal organizations and individuals such as the broadcast media. So many people would like to monopolize public political speech and thought bending it to conform to special controlling interests .
Perhaps in the past there actually were three ‘estates’ in American democracy. The people, the government and the print media that supposedly expressed the will of the people through publication. Obviously that role became obsolete and evolved into becoming rather repressive occasionally with the rise of Internet blog writing that anyone on Earth in a free society could use for themselves including U.S. citizens.
The traditional media did not go quietly into that good night and fade away as blogs rose. Obsolete print and broadcast media forms of business clung to any gambit and lever possible to remain relevant even as their monopoly of public expression ended.
The rich too that has enjoyed a cozy relationship and corner on the media market ownership neither were content with the appearance of the Internet vox populi and free public speech for anyone; they crimped down the free speech of the early Internet blogs through acquisition and control of web sites. Large corporations that grew from small beginnings hosted web sites that began to divide and conquer free speech and blogs under the rubric of moderating content.
During the centuries of monopoly of public speech the print media enjoyed followed later by the broadcast media after invention of radio about a century ago, anyone that wanted to rule others could just get into the media without needing to be elected.
Power of the media in the old days wasn’t as blatantly repressive or controlling as in the present era when its value fell into decline and quality was debased, yet it provided an unelected means for publicized speech.
The U.S. Government does sometimes lack modernizing competence for upgrading how laws written in and for prior times and culture are applied today, and may fail to respond to existential political challenges too regularly with the fast pace of change. It should be seeking ways to actualize and upgrade democracy and national sovereignty. Democracy needs to be defended against media monopolies that attack private citizen blogs and bloggers; cliques of networked goons that repress free speech where they can as yap dogs of corporatism. The government needs to defend the new vox populi; internet blogs from corporate censorship and control. Corporations should not be the only place where poor private citizens can publish or have their material not simply disappear as corporate apparachiks deem amusing.
The U.S. government should recognize the value to a democratic society of free speech and blogger blog independence, integrity and longevity. Citizen free speech publications should not be subject to the whims and vagaries of corporations and political party partisans working for them.
The argument is made that private interests own the free speech platforms and have the right to censor them, and that is true. That is why the government should add blogging of the people as a fundamental, inalienable and necessary right for the citizens of a free society and create a platform and server providing space hosting for every citizen with a social security number a permanent, no problem or censorship blog and dat storage area publicly viewable with the account holders permission per item. The material should be available and secure for life.
If the vox populi is secure, corporations that own internet sites should be more motivated to make their sites more serviceable and trustworthy instead of treacherous. Some writers have had their web blogging sites disappear many times, or have been censored or banned too often with their material deleted.
Understandably there is great resistance to allowing a secure vox populi to arise and remain that could voice political opinions antipathetic to concentrated wealth special interests and corrupt political elite’s will-to-power or monopoly and ownership of free speech venues to tame them. Maybe it is still not too late in the day to fix the problem. Even journalists (a very quaint, anachronistic term) might down-size and adapt to a Vox Populi role themselves in small professional high-quality investigative and think tank research units that publish their information for-profit not as rivals, but as new developments of the Vox Populi of the people as the voice of the people not as the third, but as part of the second estate; the people of the United States that have returned the voice of the people to the people.
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