英语专业精读小论文IsWesternpressapawnortrulyfree.docVIP

Is Western press a pawn or truly free? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers Since John Milton put forward Freedom of Press, the mankind has been making efforts to strive for the maximal freedom of speech. Today, with the development of news industry, Freedom of Press becomes a special right of the news medias when they satisfy citizen s right-to-known, it is the essential guarantee that the news medias complete the mission of spreading information. However, due to special itself, the legal guarantee of the Press Freedom has its deficiency and limitation. Nowadays, almost everybody believes that the freedom of the media is an essential prerequisite of a modern democracy. Yet, at the same time, many people are also convinced that the media are turning democratic politics into a branch of show business. Instead of rational debate between rival ideas, contemporary politics have been trivialized into a series of sound bites and photo opportunities for couch potatoes watching the television news bulletins. Yet, for the Enlightenment philosophers, the struggle for media freedom was fought to create the conditions for the participation of the common people in democratic politics. In their view, citizens of a democratic republic had to decide the issues of the day amongst themselves through public debate, including in print. In the late-eighteenth centuries, this participative form of media freedom was put into practice. With the help of a few assistants, revolutionary heroes such as Franklin or Marat were able to print their own publications on their own printing presses. Although the philosophers usually defended media freedom with political or moral arguments, the exercise of this fundamental right was made possible by the widespread ownership of cheap wooden