ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the economic structure within which news is produced can shape what kind of news people consume. In German sociologist Jürgen Haberma's view, the growth of capitalism provided an alternative power base with enough financial backing to ensure a space between the private realm of the home and the established power of the state, in which free people were able to engage in rational debate about the organization of their society. He argued that liberal democracy and the free exchange of information that must accompany it, was destroyed by the very forces that gave birth to it. The existing monopoly newspapers in the USA made staggering profits because they sucked up all the available advertising for the metropolitan areas they serviced. It was this economic success that set the scene for the collapse that came with the arrival of online news.
