Freedom of the media carries with it certain responsibilities of honesty, fairness, accuracy and accountability. The media are responsible for the majority of the observations and experiences from which we build up our personal understanding of the world and how it works.
Much of our view of reality is based on media messages that have been pre-constructed and have attitudes, interpretations and conclusions already built in. The media, to a great extent, give us our sense of reality. Without mass media, openness and accountability are impossible in contemporary democracies. Freedom of the media carries with it certain responsibilities of honesty, fairness, accuracy and accountability. The power of the media to create and destroy human values comes with great responsibility. Such power ought not to be in the hands of a few.
The media are a centre of power in the political system, having great influence on politics and on forming social change. Television can greatly influence the election of a national leader on the basis of image. The power is the power to decide who will communicate what to whom.
Today even those who loathe the media must use the media. The Taliban, to take an extreme example, banned television, photographs and computers but now use what they called ‘tools of the devil’ to refocus world attention on the war in Afghanistan.
The media’s main impact is psychological and intellectual. Media and entertainment companies shape public opinion and help frame the terms of public debate. The media is what we read, listen to and watch. In parallel, through its close relationship with advertisers, the media also exerts a powerful influence on the decisions we make, the products we buy, and the sort of questions we ask when we make our everyday choices.
The long view of history proves media's power by showing that the medium itself, in the long run, is more powerful than the messages it carries, because the medium determines what can be...