The daunting reality of the contemporary world is that autocracies and semiauthoritarian
states lack the basic foundation for building a democracy. In these
countries, the media are weak, fragile, and at risk of collapse, which means that
the challenge is not to pressure media and media educators to surrender power,
but rather to figure out how to regenerate legitimate power in the first place.
The imperative is not just mediate empowerment of citizens but also make them
interested in truth, in full and universal knowledge, rather than in improving
society. This would be ‘political thought’, which instigates the achievement of
knowledge, by making the civil society play a role in forming a collective view
and a common mission to make the states serve the interests of their people instead
of the current reverse situation that ended by strikes, violence and societal
disintegration in Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan and Egypt.
