Media Influence on Policy Making in Democraties

Résumé du document

In Western democracies, the first media is the television, even though the Internet is fast growing fast in importance. Three actors play a great role in the media sphere: the journalists, the lawmakers and the audience. The job of thee Journalist is to collect information and convey it objectively to the public. However, sometimes, their role goes much further than that and has a great influence on policy making. This statement leads us first to answer some terminological questions and identify the scope of the subject. Lawmakers are both politicians and judges considering the fact that they "create" the law when they interpret sources of law, even if they prefer the term "discover". They are the people who have the power to make the law. Mass media is all kind of media which reaches a large audience. An elite group is constituted by the most cultivated classes of a country which enjoy a privileged status. The expansion of the global media had the consequence of bringing politics to everyday life. The media maintains a relationship between politicians and public opinion, and this is so important that all politicians have a media communication agent. The mass media then can be seen as a democratic pressure on lawmakers, the problem being who exercises it.

Extraits

[...] Another kind of impact is when the media influence the decisions of the judges and juries. Normally, the judiciary has to be independent from the public opinion. It only has to apply existed norms and the opinion is not part of it. The famous Speluncean Explorers case imagined by Lon Fuller deals with the question of the influence of the public opinion towards judges. The judge Handy said: About of the public expressed the belief that the defendants should be pardoned or let off with the kind of token punishment. [...]

[...] The law reflects the cohesion of the society. For example, criminal law expresses “cohesion based on shared values”, which is a “mechanical solidarity”. In that case, law is the collective consciousness. The other solidarity is the “organic solidarity” based on “functional interdependence of differentiated groups in society and specialised occupational or social roles of individual members”. Durkheim[11] believed that the modern society is a “cohesive system of moral regulation and the law ( ) the primary expression and support of this moral system”. [...]

[...] Historically, the Labour Party was seen as the defender of the working class interests. Goldthorpe et Al., in their study of the ‘‘Affluent worker'' in 1969, notice a "shift of working-class sentiment away from Labour" to Conservative.[35] In the conclusion of the study, Goldthorpe reports different thesis which can interpret this fact. One of them is the "idea of alienation".[36] Referring to Marcuse and Gorz, Goldthorpe explains the alienation of the working class as arising in "neo-capitalist societies in the form ( . [...]

[...] But [t]he working man knows that the law is a rod which the bourgeois has prepared for him; and when he is not compelled to do so he never appeals to the law.[19] The argument that some laws are favorable to the working class is easily reversed by Marxists by analyzing it as a concession to maintain a minimum level of happiness in order to avoid strong reaction of the class.[20] II. Lawmakers constraint by public opinion when expressed in medias The expansion of mass media gave it an important role in democracies. Mass media are the best way to bring together the political sphere and the citizens. They both interact by the way of the media The most interesting point is the impact of the public opinion on lawmakers that are very attentive to the opinion of their electors A. [...]

[...] The impact on lawmakers On one hand, we know that the first role of the media is to inform the audience by reporting news objectively. But we can observe that they also have a great influence on legislation. The strongest media serving this purpose is the press, which have no legal restrictions maintain a political balance in their broadcasting”.[27] By consequence they can adopt strong positions about law proposals. On the other hand, politicians are dependant of their image in the media. [...]