Messages: Free Expression, Media and the West from Gutenberg to Google

Free expression is in trouble.It can no longer be certain of its best protection–"the general will of the people" – as Alexander Hamilton put it over two centuries ago. Today, the public, faced with the excesses of tabloid journalism and explicitness of all kinds in other media, appears no longer to be convinced that free expression is a crucial foundation of civil society. Yet, for all its faults, free expression under the law has, as Churchill once said of democracy, to be better than any alternative system.
Messages is a search for the origins of media forms, from print and stage to photography, film and broadcasting. With a wealth of illuminating anecdotes and quotations, Brian Winston clearly and forcefully argues, in jargon-free language, that the development of mass media has been an essential engine underpinning all human rights and driving the Western concept of the individual.