The Media Revolution

Assaf Kfoury: "Change is also coming to the world of information gathering and dissemination, which is also becoming multipolar and more difficult to censor. Less than two decades ago there was no Internet and no Web. Satellite television stations have proliferated and gained worldwide audiences in the last ten years. Online news outlets have grown exponentially and are able to attract an ever-wider range of publics. There are now multiple ways of getting alternative or unfiltered news that mainstream media will not transmit.

Al-Jazeera is perhaps the most famous satellite channel. It was founded in 1996 and gained international recognition after September 11, 2001, when it was the only channel to cover the war on Afghanistan live from Kabul. After the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Al-Jazeera became a bugaboo for US officials, who routinely blamed it for the failed occupation; President Bush was even reported to have considered bombing the station's headquarters in Qatar, because it was "nothing more than a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiments."[47] May Al-Jazeera never be muzzled.

Better still, for the purpose of writing an article such as this one, are the large archives stored online and the powerful search engines to mine them (not only Google). Online "data mining" -- an area of ongoing research in computer science -- is increasingly reliable and efficient, and has forever made manual archival research obsolete.

Our ability to break the mainstream media's stranglehold on information is all for the better and foretells the day when we will be able to more effectively challenge the powers that be and the hacks serving them."