“A pen can be more powerful than a sword!”. This simple phrase shows the
capacity of media. As long as we can think about the meaning of media it was
used by political systems to support their power. Media can be used to give the
people a special way of thinking, but it can also be a free tool to support a free
thinking about affairs. With modern technology in the beginning of the 20th
century people were confronted with mass media for the first time. The states in
the second World War used the media to spread information – it did not matter if
the information were wrong or false as long it secured the support of the
population: Propaganda was born. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev,
also discovered the power of the media. He tried to revamp the Soviet Union by
allowing the media a greater range of freedoms under his policy of glasnost. But
as he and the world soon discovered, the power of accurate information delivered
in a timely fashion to those who needed it soon overwhelmed the barriers he had
hoped to maintain. The destruction of communism and of the Soviet empire soon
followed.
Table of Contents:
1 Introduction
2 The soap-opera capitalism
3 Revolution through information
4 Information is power
5 Conclusion
6 Bibliography
1 Introduction
“A pen can be more powerful than a sword!”. This simple phrase shows the capacity of media. As long as we can think about the meaning of media it was used by political systems to support their power. Media can be used to give the people a special way of thinking, but it can also be a free tool to support a free thinking about affairs. With modern technology in the beginning of the 20th century people were confronted with mass media for the first time. The states in the second World War used the media to spread information - it did not matter if the information were wrong or false as long it secured the support of the population: Propaganda was born. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, also discovered the power of the media. He tried to revamp the Soviet Union by allowing the media a greater range of freedoms under his policy of glasnost. But as he and the world soon discovered, the power of accurate information delivered in a timely fashion to those who needed it soon overwhelmed the barriers he had hoped to maintain. The destruction of communism and of the Soviet empire soon followed. (1)
2 The soap-opera capitalism
Many years before anyone thought about the breakdown of the communist system it was already possible for the population in the Eastern states to watch western television channels. For example in East Germany it was not allowed to do so, but it was also not really prosecuted. On the one hand people could follow the uncutted news how the western world saw it. But maybe the biggest impact on their minds did not have the news, maybe it was more the fiction world of movies. Soap operas like “Dallas” showed the population in the East how people in the West are living - okay, not really, but it looked real. Can the capitalism really be so bad like it was thaught at school? The people in the movie are happy, have great jobs and also some fruits on their tables for which the Eastern people had to stay in line. With watching this soap worlds the people got an special rosy pink view of capitalism and the way of living in the western world. For example I experienced with my own relatives in East Germany that they really thought that everyone in West Germany has a own house with a big garden and at least one big car to travel around the world.
But even if the view of the western world they got was not the real fact, no one can doubt the big excitement what was connected with the first publications when people were able for the first time in their lives to read direct critisism of those still in power, forcing such political leaders to respond to the press. More importantly, the free flow of information empowered individuals to believe that they, and not some self-appointed rulers, should determine how to run their lives and whom to select to govern their countries. (2) In this way we can say that free press provided the basis for the emergence of all other freedoms.
3 Revolution through information
But to come back to the example about East Germany I will also show that they did not just have a pink capitalism picture but they also got the information about what they wanted to reach with a revolution. So we can say that the East Germans knew very well about the life of their brothers in West Germany, because they looked, like wirtten above, the western television and listened to the western radio. So we can say, that media had a big impact on the life of the people in the communist regimes and on the revolution, because people had the possibility to inform themselfes what is going on in the world. And when the first East Germans escaped to the West and the ones back at home saw that on the television, it was only a matter of time until the people demonstrated on a big scale against the regime. Furthermore I think also that the free information for everyone at this time prevented worse military actions like it happened decades ago: No soldier on the wall of Berlin wanted to shoot a single shot. Not just because they did not feel to support the system anymore, but also because such a crime would have been public for the whole world. Maybe for the same reason the Eastern governement hesitated to hinder the people from escaping.
But because of the obvious and demonstrated power of free media to transform unfree societies, too many people in both the post-Soviet states and in the West came to believe that nothing could prevent the domestic media from playing that role, that democrazy was secure, and that the future was one of unalloyed brightness. (3)
[...]
- Quote paper
- Dipl-Betriebswirt (FH) Alexander Bauer (Author), 2002, The role of the media in breaking-up the communist system, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/177462
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