Seats And Forms Of Power

In politics and social science, power is the ability to influence people's behaviour. In order 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 authority seems 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.

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