ABSTRACT
We stand, Rupert Murdoch says, at the dawn of a new age of communication. Competition is its key. Freedom and choice of the market-place must replace regulation and scarcity. Remove state control and the interfering hands of bureaucrats, and new media will flower to cater to mass and minority audiences alike. In Media and Democracy John Keane uses these views of Murdoch’s to illustrate the manner in which old liberal arguments about press freedom have been resuscitated and appropriated in order to attack state-owned and stateregulated broadcast media. There has been, he argues, an ‘extraordinary revival’ of the canons of press freedom. These have been conjured up, several centuries after their invention, to establish the right of individuals to freely debate politics, this time by market-place liberals seeking to displace public broadcasters and place the development of new digital-and satellite-based technologies of mass communication beyond state regulation.
