Democratic Landscape Research Articles

Running in Cyberspace

This article considers numerous web sites devoted to the O. J. Simpson case. Reviewing the literature on crime news production, the author argues that there is a dynamic that exists among law enforcement, journalists, and the public. The technology of the internet provided a cyberspace in which individual authors could review and analyze evidence and media discourse to support various claims about the case. While acknowledging that the internet is not a utopian democratic landscape, the author does claim that some decentering of the forces of knowledge production is possible, as evidenced from the web pages that present counterinformation.