Mass Media Promotes Democracy
The journalistic side of the twentieth century can be defined as the struggle for democracy and an independent media against propaganda and subservience to the state. That struggle culminated during the first half of this century in the seizure of the means of communication by the demagogues of the 1930s and 1940s -- Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin -- and their Cold War reincarnation of the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy -- the ghost that still haunts U.S. journalism. (1) Modern journalism began around 1890 with the advent of a national system of communication and has had a pretty long run.
Describing Philadelphia on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Sam Bass Warner observed that gossip in the taverns provided Philadelphia's basic cells of community life.... Every ward of the city had its inns and taverns and the London Coffee House served as central communication node of the entire city.... Out of the meetings at the neighborhood tavern came much of the commonplace community development... essential to the governance of the city... And made it possible... To form effective committees of correspondence. (2)
The public remains the implicit term of the First Amendment. It is the God term -- the worshipped concept -- of liberal society and the press. Without the public, neither the press nor democracy makes any sense. Today, however, this original conception of a public of discussion and disputation, independent of both the press and the state, has been abandoned. Public opinion, for example, no longer refers to opinions expressed in public and then recorded in the press. Public opinion is now formed by the press and modeled by the public opinion industry, polling and interest groups. (3)
Public life stands for a form of politics in which, in Jefferson's phrase, "We could all be participants in the government of our affairs."(4) Political equality, in its most primitive mode -- to borrow and twist some lines from Bruce Smith -- simply means the right to be seen and heard, or to have a public life. (4) Therefore, the object of politics remains the desire to restore what Alexis de Tocqueville called the "little republics within the frame of the larger republic," and to create a palpable public to which each citizen can belong. (4)
The transition from the original understanding of the press, the public and politics to journalism in the modem era was long and twisted. Throughout the nineteenth century, the public sphere divided into regional and class-based conflicting factions, organized around political parties and a partisan press. Journalism became an organ of such parties or ideologically aligned with political parties. Journalism began to express and reflect a bifurcated public sphere, as individuals joined politics through parties and the press.
The first national and first mass audience -- open to all. Modem communications media allowed individuals in nations as large as the United States to be linked, for the first time, directly to the "imaginary community of the nation," without the mediating influence of regional and other local affiliations. (5) The modern period culminated in the network era of television, when the entire nation seemed to be assembled in front of the three commercial networks -- CBS, ABC and NBC -- especially on the high holy days of politics, such as those surrounding the Kennedy assassination or the quadrennial political conventions. (6)
This rise of national media represented a centripetal force in social organization. Such media greatly enhanced the ability to control vast expanses of territory by reducing signal time and laying down direct lines of access among national centers -- such as New York, Washington and Hollywood -- and dispersed audiences. While they owed something to the crusading tactics of newspapers, muckraking magazines, like sensational newspapers, did not dwell long on any one topic, as Michael McGerr pointed out. (7) They were hit-and-run artists who exposed corruption or urged the passage of pro-consumer legislation, but they did not have the shape and persistence to constitute a tradition of journalism.
In the twentieth century, new traditions of journalism and particular conceptions of the relationship between media and democracy formed themselves in mutual relief. The press, in effect, broke away from politics and became the so-called Fourth Estate. It established itself, at least in principle,...
The spin that often surrounds war, is fundamentally damaging even if it is intended as damage control for the nation as a whole, or at the very least the leaders of the nation. Public Belief It has been hinted at within this work that the old adage, the public does not necessarily believe what it hears, but it hears what it believes is at play when it comes to media. As
Thirdly, the growing up-to-the-minute exposure of the journalists to the physicality of the war detracted from the big picture and instead exaggerated the importance of singular happenings and specific events. It is in the loss of the big picture that the Bush regime is most able to capitalize on its military's control of the press. While in the 1990s, the President's father struggled with "pooled" journalists and the lack of
Domestically, Novosti disseminated information on life in other countries and on life in the Soviet Union. All of these institutional structures fell under the authority of the Party. The television system in the Soviet Union was centrally controlled through the State Committee for Tele- vision and Radio (Gostelradio), which coordinated the communication of the ideological message sent down from above. The reorganization and elevation of this committee to the all-union
As recent events in the Middle East have clearly demonstrated, Facebook is more on the side of the politically disadvantaged and the poor as they have increasingly embraced Facebook and other social media while the governments in the region tried to ban them. Many governments such as that of China do not allow Facebook primarily because they want to avert scenarios they have seen in the Middle East. Facebook revolutions It
Models of Media and Politics A review of media / political models sheds some light on why the United States' cultural themes have been such a dominant dynamic in Europe, among other global venues. In describing the three models of media and politics, Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini report that the media in Southern Europe (the "Mediterranean" or "Polarized Pluralist Model") is "an institution of the political and literary worlds"
He would sometimes be wheel chaired to the door through which he would enter to make a public appearance, but once at the door, his leg braces would be put on him, and he would rely on his son's arm for support and balance (43-48). Later, with his son's support, he was able to use a cane, and the extent of his disability was successfully downplayed by the force
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