The real question concerning news-print and mass-mediated technologies more generally, then, becomes whether the unruly, chaotic freedom of democratic discourse is preferable to monopolies of information managed by a select few.

The wager of democracy is precisely this: that a free society must allow for isegoria no matter how unseemly the results.

Yet conflating democracy with good government would be an intellectual and historical mistake. Democracy, from the Athenians to today, has never promised good government. It has only promised—it can only promise—a freedom of deliberation among citizens and their representatives, with rhetoric as the key tool with which to exercise such freedom.

There is no democracy without an open process of deliberation, and there is no democracy whose processes of deliberation escape the hazards of persuasive rhetoric.

For many, persuasion still signals coercion or manipulation, yet the persuasion of rhetoric is the fundamental medium of democracy—a medium that, like all other communication technologies, opens itself to exploitation.

Free speech does not guarantee truth or virtue; it simply allows for the confrontation of persuasive communication.

Technologies changed media that changed communicative styles that changed culture that changed thinking and interaction. How we centered ourselves as individuals and the relationships we had to culture, institutions, and the nation-state all transformed.

For several decades, the American mainstream press endeavored to satisfy the political demand of neutrality, sacrificing even objectivity itself to avoid labels of bias.

technological maelstrom that saturates our own cultural environment