The BBC has an article on P2P networks and their ability to increase the kinds of news that we see. This is a theme that I touched on in my law school personal statement, but I haven't written much about it anywhere else. Here's an excerpt:

In the summer of 1999, I spent seven nights in a Croatian hospital bed. I was not injured, though NATO was in the final weeks of its bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Twenty kilometers from the border, I slept in a rural medical building and repaired farming infrastructure damaged in an earlier Balkan conflict. I had never been outside of the United States, and those days were the closest that I have come to the wars that most Americans experience only on television. What fascinated me, aside from cleaning grain elevators and digging septic wells, was the clamor of heated responses whenever CNN’s coverage of Yugoslavia appeared on a television set. Some of my companions complained about the lack of context in CNN’s stories. Others offered rationalizations of the underlying ethnic conflict and supplemental pieces of Balkan history. I did not agree with many of my companions’ sentiments, but it was apparent that they found the American media’s narrative to be an oversimplification of the local story.

As a 19-year-old journalism student, I knew vaguely of American media deregulation’s role in this dilemma. Before the 1980s, the U.S. government chaperoned the public airwaves. Traditional broadcasters had to provide “public interest” programming like the evening news, and limits on nationwide station-ownership fostered programmatic diversity. Over the past twenty years, however, broadcasters successfully lobbied to remove most of those regulations. Television networks cited competition from new technologies like cable and satellite, and the Federal Communications Commission gradually abdicated much of its oversight role. Without regulatory protection, expensive international news coverage started to disappear. Most of the networks’ foreign correspondents – journalists who could have added depth to my friends’ stories – became casualties of the ratings war. The market hobbled CNN’s competitors, leaving a single American voice to speak for much of the world. As a temporary expatriate, I started see how policy choices can limit the breadth of perspectives in the media.

Cut to my college studies on media regulation, working in broadcasting to put myself through school, becoming interested in how the Internet differs from traditional media:

The Internet’s greatest departure from traditional broadcasting is that it empowers people to engage in their own representation. On the Net, a few thousand dollars can put anyone in touch with more people than my radio station reached at full power. My Croatian friends could not comment on CNN’s draft of history to anyone except me, but witnesses of more recent conflicts shared their stories on the Internet, without foreign correspondents. Like many Americans, I watched embedded reporters and their Hollywood-caliber coverage of America’s most recent war. However, I also read the web diary of a Baghdad resident and wrote about the availability of Arab-language television footage on peer-to-peer networks. The Internet’s architecture provides a venue for perspectives that would never be heard via the edited, centralized channels of broadcasting. I believe that there is tremendous, humbling value in a technology that allows so many to speak so loudly.

.:link:.