Journalism: the political yo-yo

It surprises me how much public opinion of journalism changes, and how the trends seem to bounce back and forth between opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. Reading over the assigned ER readings, it appears difficult to try to categorize time periods into unified views of free speech. And well it should: with the broad spectrum of people, there are doubtless many points of view. The overall theme seems to be a bouncing-back of ideologies from censorship to free speech and back again, with changing rationales for the reasoning behind it. This pattern leads me to believe that it will continue, and in new and interesting ways. Since the internet has blossomed, censorship laws and possibilities of communication have grown in size and diversity. Government authorities have had to adapt to the capabilities of internet communication, adjusting censorship policies and tenets as twittering of news from other countries, as well as the transmission of ideas, have taken ahold of the internet. Those who deal with free speech issues will have to come up with new reasons for restricting or not restricting media flow. My dearest wish sometimes is to make all this fluctuation stop, and have absolute definitions of things like free speech (and which political party is completely right). Unfortunately, like most idealist dreams, this will remain unfulfilled(unless some scientist brings Martin Luther King, Jr. back from the dead to rally the masses and change things).