SYNTHESE PLACES AND FORMS OF POWER
In politicsand social science,poweris the ability to influencepeople's behaviour. Inorder to live together members of a community accept rules, regulations, laws. This helps to create social cohesion but can also lead to conflicts and tensions. Even when authorityseems absolute, there are always counter-powers which question it, aim at limiting its excesses and resist it. Power may also be exercised in a less obvious way.
That’s why in the context of our English class, we have focused on the role of the press and we have raised the following question : to what extent can the Press reveal the truth and influence people’s judgment ?
To skim through this subject, we have relied on various documents such as the video interview of Edward Snowden or again the audio document about the fall of Wikileaks. I’ll develop each one of them to show first how necessary the Press is to denounce and take on famous causes, then I’ll insist upon the limits of the freedom of the press, especially when it comes too tricky matters and eventually how the public as well as the financers of newspapers are weighing on the content of the information.
To start with, in the first document we studied, Reporters Without Borders wants to highlight the absolute necessity to have journalists digging for information in order to reveal it to the public and especially disclose matters the political power wants to keep secret. We may wonder how insidious censorship may be since even if in some countries such as Cuba, death awaits the curious journalists, in Western countries, other forms of pressure are resorted to. However, the way the poster broaches the topic is relevant because it displays a journalist with a bullet in her head, probably because she has been too investigative.
Let’s now turn to the video interview of Edward Snowden. Unlike the previous document, Snowden mainly tackles the issue of the violation of privacy. He deals with the way he found out about the misbehaviourof the NSA in terms of private information, since the famous US intelligence agency gathered thousands of pieces of information through hacking and phone tapping around he world. Indeed, in this source, the author underlines the unreliable basis on which you may be spied on by. For instance, he mentions the fact that a neighbor might denounce you on flimsy arguments, which will lead to your being investigated by the NSA. Even though the NSA doesn’t specifically rely to the Press, it reminds us of what happened to the newspaper News of the World. Indeed, its editor Rupert Murdoch tapped the phone lines of many celebrities and victims in order to get a scoop and publish it sensationally in his tabloid.
However, the third document I’ve got here, Deciding What to Print, gets out of the dual vision of privacy boundaries and interestingly enough, brings a fresh vision of the role of the press through the idea that what the readers require from a newspaper as well as what the funding sponsors are willing to publish actually puts pressure on newspapers. It seems too simplistic to claim that you either respect the private lives of celebs or the confidential government information or give it all to the public because people have a right to know everything in order to make enlightened decisions. What this third document puts forward is the expectations of the readers and what they actually buy the newspaper for, which is at loggerheads with what people traditionally think and what the two previous documents showed. Therefore, we may say that it is all about a balance between the freedom of the press to deal with any subject they like and security required by some situations, which forces the press to keep down some information.