Law & European Studies What role do the mass media play in the political process in constitutional democracies? Is this to be welcomed?

... Laura Barrie Law & European Studies What role do the mass media play in the political process in constitutional democracies? Is this to be welcomed? When the Polish Union leader Lech Walesa was asked what effect Radio Free Europe had had on Solidarity's activities in Communist Poland, he responded, "Would there be earth without the sun?" A spokesman for the democratic "No" opposition that upset the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in a plebiscite remarked, "In fifteen minutes of television time, we destroyed fifteen years of government publicity for the dictatorship." The Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin, stated that Tiananmen Square illustrated the "chaos" that will result "if the tools of public opinion are not tightly controlled in the hands of true Marxists." In an address at Harvard University, Alexander Solzhenitsyn declared that "the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive, and

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