What is the role of mass media in liberal democracies Do you think the Essay

What is the role of mass media in liberal democracies Do you think the media fulfil these functions (Base your answer on liberal theory and the political econ - Essay Example But, evidence from electronic and print media today reveals that the media houses have largely failed to live up to their defined roles. This essay will expound on this thesis by way of citing relevant examples from scholarly sources. One of the talking points amongst the intelligentsia is the dangers posed by lack of diversity and representation in the mainstream media’s coverage. The phenomena of media concentration, which has seen greater consolidation in the last decade, gives rise to production of news content that serves the interests of select media elite. This concentration of power in the hands of large media conglomerates makes it easy for them to set the political agenda on the national scale as exemplified by Rupert Murdoch’s near monopoly ownership of media space in Britain. It is no surprise then that the issues that they cover are infested with their personal biases, prejudices and interests. The general public, made helpless by this system, are presented a narrow political agenda that holds no real significance for them (Eldridge, Kitzinger & Williams, 1997, p. 27). In other words, while the media has the power to elicit a policy response from the government, the outcomes tend to ben efit the media elite and ruling classes rather than people. Only a few news stories get picked for publication/broadcast among numerous other pieces competing for the same space/time. The journalists in charge of deciding the news content are subject to personal biases, external coercions (both implicit and explicit) and other constraints that influence their decision making. For these reasons, there are only a minority of journalists who adhere to standards of objectivity and professional integrity, while the rest succumb to various pressures consciously or otherwise. This decline in journalistic ethos is seen across geo-political entities and cultures,

Best account of the relation of self and society (social and self) Essay

Best account of the relation of self and society (social and self) - Essay Example Liberals, it is supposed, stand for a framework that allows individuals to choose their ends, or goals; and communitarians, oppositely, stand for a public choice of ends and goals for individuals as part of the society. Thomas Nagel’s normative language might be considered, as he words it, â€Å"cultural liberalism† (23), and therefore values the intellectual ventilation known as pluralism, which accepts a multitude of truths and ideas. Michael Sandel represents a classical communitarianism that treats civic virtue, and the republic, as the most worthy publically chosen end, and bases this on a theory of the â€Å"boundaries to obligation†. Marilyn Friedman, on the other hand, explicates and defends a â€Å"redirection† in communitarian thought toward a more congenial relationship between self and community from the feminist perspective. As different as these articles may seem from one another at first glance, the connections between them can be read in detail between the lines. One of Nagel’s points in his piece is the control over the public sphere that envelops the cultural and ideological environments in which young people are raised; forty years ago, he claims, the â€Å"public pieties were patriotic and anticommunist; now they are multicultural and feminist† (Nagel 24). On this point, and from a feminist perspective, Friedman goes on to develop the communitarian thought of Sandel, but in a way that shifts away from gender subordination characteristic of what shall be called â€Å"classical communitarianism† that stresses the Hellenistic notion of civic virtue. Sandel clearly sees a connection between the good of a society and the concept of a social purpose like that found in the writings of Aristotle on civic virtue. These intellectual conflicts between liberalism and communitarianism, wi th feminism in between, clearly demonstrate the normative problem of political theory, where