Originally Posted by OpieCunningham

There is a large jump in faith to presume that an important piece of information owned by a media conglomerate is going to reach the full audience that would be interested in viewing it simply because of a leak via the Internet (or something similar).

Even if you throw out the issue of trust - do you have relatively more trust in NBC or some random link on the Internet? - the simple fact is that any one piece of information on the Internet is not going to reach the audience of a documentary or the audience of a media outlet not owned by the owners of the copyrighted information.

We could get into a discussion over the ability for any documentary (Moore's or anyone's) to have an objective truth which seperates it from a screenplay, but that would be a very different discussion.

The issue is essentially that the media and the government are effectively (if not actually) collaborating to dispense with bothersome issues created by Democracy - in the case of the media, they want perpetual ownership of material they were involved in creating. In the case of the government, if they screw something up, they would prefer as few people as possible to know about it.

There is no back-room secret society which gets together and decides that certain regulations are going to be enacted to kill Democracy - rather, it is self-preservation of both parties.