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                         THE NET SHALL MAKE US FREE
                                by Joe Shea
                  Editor-in-Chief, The American Reporter

          LOS ANGELES -- The men and women who [24 Hours of Democracy]
     crowded into my small bungalow apartment
     in the center of Hollywood were from 20 different nations in
     Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. Our connection, now
     personal, was the Internet.

          As editor of the world's first online daily newspaper, The
     American Reporter, I was invited by the United States Information
     Service to host these journalists from around the world to
     increase their understanding of the Net's potential for creating
     a free press throughout the world.

          One of the visitors was the deputy director-general of the
     Xinhua official Chinese news agency, and with a nod of the head
     he could confirm our top story for the day's paper on Chinese
     leader Xiang Jemin's effort to rein in the generals who wanted to
     attack Taiwan. He's becoming a subscriber, he told the USIS.

          In discussions with journalists from Papua New Guinea,
     Zambia, Guyana, Bosnia, Pakistan and points in all directions, I
     saw the true dimensions of the Net's potential to catalyze a free
     flow of information to the entire world. We are already doing
     things to bring that about.

          Our reporter in Indonesia, Andreas Harsono, writes
     frequently for us about the efforts of the Suharto government to
     arrest and jail journalists whose work threatens to reveal the
     depth of the existing corruption in that country.

          Imagine Andreas multiplied by 20, and then by as many
     countries as there are on the globe, each journalist struggling
     to tell the story of oppression and disinformation to all the Net
     users of the world. It is hard to keep people enslaved by
     ideology or force if they have an unlimited flow of truthful
     information available to them from a freely accessible source.

          To help keep us free here in America, The American Reporter
     published an "indecent" commentary by Judge Steve Russell of San
     Antonio, Texas to test the constitutionality of the
     Communications in Decency Act signed by President Clinton just a
     few minutes earlier, and then filed suit in New York to stop
     enforcement of the law. We are waiting for a three-judge panel to
     hear our case early in April.

          The American Reporter feels we must resist all efforts at
     "local," i.e., national, suppression and censorship everywhere,
     or risk the loss of the ability of the Net to make democracy a
     reality for ours and future generations. If we are successful in
     doing so, the truth -- carried on the Net to the waiting, weary
     world -- will truly make us free.

                                  [Image]

Joe Shea
Editor-in-Chief
The American Reporter joeshea@netcom.com
http://www.newshare.com/Reporter/today.html