Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee View Post
FoxNews competes with many other privately owned media companies whose content and opinions are not tightly controlled by a centralized government. And not all of FoxNews's competitors are large corporations; there are small "indie" publishers and academic printing presses, etc. This was true even before the Internet age and the "digital distribution" revolution.

In short, in Western society, people who dissented from the government's official point of view had a much easier time propagating their own views than Soviet dissidents did. (Which is not to say that there was NEVER censorship in the US, or legal harassment of dissidents; but in general, censors in the US had much less power, and dissidents had much greater opportunities to express and publish their beliefs legally.)

P.S. I would add that although FoxNews is clearly biased, its biases have sometimes been exaggerated by people who devoutly believe in the "objectivity" of the BBC and The New York Times, etc.
BBC, The New York Times etc are not much different from FoxNews. Russia Today is probably different, but who watches it? All the big Western media belong to one group of people, behave coordinately and are connected with the states. Of course there is more possibilty to publish something in the West than in the Soviet Union, but that happens only because the Western rulers are able to make their people ignore other sources of information.