The Status of Information in President '96

Certainly President '96 offers participants more Delegate Standings and one sees a list of the candidates and how they are faring in their race towards their party's convention.

Now click on the icon for News, and a list of articles from the current week appears. Granted, these stories are written by various media agencies which are constrained by their own biases, but they allow for a more comprehensive view of the political picture than do the individual candidates' homepages.

A News Archive allows one to search back for other articles of relevance. But the list of 'top stories' is rather sparse, and only three articles are displayed for the week of May 1. These limited options can serve as an instrument for focusing public attention on certain issues deigned by the media as important. The question arises: who decides what stories are shown? In a cyberdemocracy which hopes to attain the tenets of Habermas's 'ideal speech situation' (Ess 243), shouldn't smaller publications with limited circulation be allowed a voice? Or should only the mainstream periodicals like the Washington Post and New York Times be given priority to avoid a supersaturation of opinion?