Historically the press has placed responsibility on the people in power; he has spread new ideas that have allowed those who are repressed and controlled to realize freedom, and he has continually brought transparency to government. American democracy was a direct result of the printing press; printers used the press to unify the country under the propaganda of a single enemy. However, the traditional press is commercialized, corporatized and increasingly bent to the will of a select few. Meanwhile, a new press is being born out of disparity and citizen demand. In the first chapter of Legal Principles and Analytical Framework, Dr. Mark Cooper, a specialist in how telecommunications shape social issues, discusses how media ownership influences the press in the United States. democracy. First, it explains why actor diversification is necessary for a functional democracy and why media concentration leads to concentrated viewpoints, which is inherently miasmic for democratic function. More specifically, it focuses on the Supreme Court's opinion on media ownership, which has consistently held that the media serves democracy through its citizens. For example, Cooper quotes Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black as saying that the First Amendment, and its inherent protection for the press's ability to rapidly disseminate information, especially dissenting opinions, was necessary for the Commonweal (Cooper 34). In this context, it is obvious that having a decentralized press reflects the self-limitation of political power in this country through branches of government that abstract political control to the local level (state rights). Therefore, just as dispersed government control facilitates localized accountability, the fractured me… in the middle of the paper… and in which public discourse is already taking place, through online communities and wikis, will only grow. That is, the worst fears of people like Cooper and Radford will never be realized, because the feelings of people like Cooper and Radford have found their way into the consciousness of a fairly large subset of citizens. Works Cited Cooper, Mark. “A Bold Aspiration for the First Amendment.” Media ownership and democracy in the digital age. Palo Alto: Center for Internet & Society, Stanford Law School, 2003. “Guantanamo Operations Manual Released on the Internet,” Reuters November 17, 2007. March 10, 2009 News Wars: What's Happening to the News. Prod. Stephen Talbod and Cowell Bergman. PBS. On the front line. WGBH Educational Foundation, 2007.Radford, Benjamin. Media myth makers. New York: Prometheus Books, 2003.