This is true even if it is the only newspaper, radio station, or TV station in town. The net effect is that the only citizens who have an absolutely unrestricted First Amendment right to disseminate their views in the press are those few who own media outlets. Media companies are restrained from disseminating reports that reflect solely their own biases and agendas, however, by U.S. news consumers, who are capable of judging balance and accuracy in reporting among the array of journalistic products available in the information marketplace. These media-savvy citizens are quick to point out the biases and errors that appear in papers or in broadcast reports. So media owners who attempt to skew news coverage to reflect their own biases risk losing the audience, and if the audience is lost, so is the revenue from advertisers who want to reach that audience.
Some critics charge that wall has been crumbling.
In part this is the result of the merger of increasing numbers and varieties of media into fewer and fewer corporate hands. Detractors of this corporate consolidation fear that a network news division will no longer be accepted as a financial loss that compensates for its cost with the prestige it provides. Balancing the cost of high quality journalism against corporate profits is one of the significant challenges in U.S. journalism today. When businesses threaten to sue over critical investigative journalism pieces or to cancel advertising, an editor or news director must decide whether to use a provocative story, even it if risks the loss of revenue or the loss of his or her own job. Thus self-censorship resulting from this dilemma, and others, may be the most prevalent form of censorship influencing the content of U.S. media today.