Does the death of Newspapers foretell the death of democracy? One school of thought says that as media companies shrink, go bankrupt & fall under the umbrella of bigger conglomerates, we lose that which is most important in all democracies ...Free Speech. As our voices flicker away, so goes the guardian of truth & justice. The sad truth of the matter is, our democracy was dying long ago.

Journalism has become polarizing & more often a reporters ego driven soap box. You don't just report the news, you have to sensationalize it, spin it, moralize it with an agenda & shove it down the masses throat. Commentators become superstars & bigger than the news they reported. Hence, they were more likely to serve their own best interest & not very often the public's interest. Look at the Gulf War, at one time every single major newspaper & TV news outlet was behind it, galvanizing a 90% public approval rating for invading Iraq. The war became a propaganda tool to drive viewers & ratings, the media became willing puppets of the government.

So is democracy only for the rich & powerful? How many of us have the resources & capital to send a satellite into space or cash to pay for the government's FTC broadcast licensing fee. A poor man has very little recourse to vent his anger & frustrations. How could he afford commercial time on radio stations, cable TV or magazines? The lone wolf who cries & holds the "End of the World is Here" sign has very little respect. Mother Nature, however, abhors a vacuum. The death of newspapers has created a new beast to take its place.

The internet has given birth to its own soap box in the form of blogs. Cyberspace, unfortunately, can be a dark cold place. Ume360 offers us the tools, the weapons & most importantly the eyeballs (billions of internet users) to which we may howl our dreams, our hopes, our passions. Which of us has it in him or her to become the next Bill O'Reilly, Howard Stern, Internet Superstar? Perez Hilton & The Drudge Report are just two examples of how a little blog became a sensation, a beacon of light in a dark void.

We can either curse our fate & spend the rest of our lives trapped in a cage, screaming how the "man" has put us down. Or we can unleash our wild side, our inner animal, our eternal rights to free speech. A fool who lets others speak for him, will eventually lose his voice altogether. So pick up that pen, get your fingers to that keyboard & start blogging away.