[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Women and Media in Democratic Society
Democracy is the most valued and also the vaguest of political terms in the modern world. Political systems as diverse as the USA, various one-party states in Africa, and European communist states all describe themselves as democracies. Indeed it is characteristic of this vagueness that when a UNESO conference on democracy was held in 1950, more than fifty nations, utterly diverse in political systems, all insisted that they were (and sometimes that only they were) democracies.
The ancient Greek word democracy means rule by the demos, which can be translated as either the people or the mob depending on one’s ideological preference. By itself democracy means little more than that, in some undefined sense, political power is ultimately in the hands of the whole adult population, and that no smaller group has the right to rule. Democracy only takes on a more useful meaning when qualified by one of the other words with which it is associated, for example liberal Democracy, representative Democracy, participatory Democracy or direct Democracy. Those who seek to justify the title d ‘democracy’ for a society where power is clearly in the hands of one section of the population (for example, in many Third World states or communist bloc countries) mean something rather different. The claim is not really that the people rule, but that they are ruled in their own interests.
Defenders of the USSR, for example, have claimed that until economic and social progress has been made, and a true socialist man created by education that is until the masses have lost their False Consciousness, democratic procedures would be worse than useless. The argument is that people cannot be left to choose their own leaders, or make their own political choices, until their vision is genuinely free of distortion and they can identify their real needs. This version of democracy has a close connection with the positive theory of liberty.......
