SOME STUDIES ON MEDIA POWER

"Power" and "media" are two terms that are often linked but potentially in conflict. The first studies on the effects of the media - mainly under totalitarian regimes - made in the 1940s and 1950s, gave the media a virtually unlimited power to shape consciousness and create emotions in the recipients. These analyzes were grouped according to the robust effects model. In democracies, considered the fourth power, the media is both coveted and feared. The power of television as a vector of information and democratic debate is shaping the long-term mode of political production. Likewise, the myth of "investigative journalism," free from all authority and all structural limitations, has made its mark in all media. But, over the past fifteen years, as liberal globalization has accelerated, this "fourth power" has lost its meaning, it has gradually lost its essential function of counter-balance. Worried especially by their pursuit of colossalism, which forced them to court other great powers, these large groups no longer proposed themselves, as a civic goal, which allowed the emergence of a "fifth power" that uses the new technologies of the internet against a civilian and citizen force against a new coalition of dominants.