Media and democracy

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The relationship between mass media and democracy can be often tense. Even
in the United States, inspite of the first Amendment that safeguards
relationship between the Press and the Government is not free from friction.
It was during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal the relation between
the media and the government became extremely bitter. The government always
fears the media for its investigative journalism.
Investigative journalism is the most important trend in modern journalism
which involves field research, scientific analysis and interpretations. It
was investigative journalism that brought into light the Water Gate scandal,
which otherwise would have been buried in the pages of history, and Richard
M. Nixon would have never resigned. The credit for investigating the
Watergate scandal goes to brave and courageous reporters of the Washington
Post and other newspapers like Jack Anderson, Carl Bernstein, Robert
Woodward and Seymor Hersh. In Nepal also fearless editors have sacrificed
their lives for the cause of investigative journalism.
Dictators always fear journalists. The French Emperor Napoleon Bounaparte
used to say, "I am more afraid of the journalists than an army of a hundred
and a thousand. The Russian statesman of the Soviet Union like Nikita
Kruschev had a horror for the journalists and historians. He used to call
them rats. Just like rats they move through holes and obscure corners of
archives and state bureaucracy and unearth facts and figures which could be
very damaging to the government. Therefore he urged that they should be kept
away from the State Archives and the state bureaucracy.
Source:
http://www.nepalnews.com.np/contents/englishweekly/telegraph/2003/dec/dec10/
national.htm