I am a graduate student at Brown enrolled on the public policy Master’s program, where my interest lies primarily in media and internet policy. I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the UK, where I read law. Aside from my studies, I have abused a position of power as a journalist and editor, first for my the Cambridge student rag “Varsity”, where I was online editor, then for the UK news network ‘Sky News’. While there last summer, I innovated a new way of online reporting, using social-networking tools Twitter and FlickR to create real-time microblogs. I since used these methods to cover the New Hampshire primary for Sky. I would love to be enrolled on this course as I have a very strong fascination for the way in which the internet may help redress the balance of power between media outlet and consumer, and would love to underpin my experience with an historical and theoretical framework.

In his article ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’, Barthes identifies the inevitable power relationship engendered by the teacher when addressing his class: in speaking, the teacher becomes the advocate for his own subjective thinking – he is unable to escape the bias of his though process, and must either freely embrace the indelible nature of ‘ephemeral speech’ or be bound to the role of conscientious functionary, rigidly reciting his premeditated thoughts. Barthes views this constraint as inherent in the natural law of speech, where one must either dismantle all vocal delivery, or simply remain mute in order to shun the authority of the speaker.

Barthes continues: by committing to language, the writer, the teacher or the thinker endures an inescapable challenge in his quest for truth. Barthes muses that “in writing about speech I am doomed to the following aporrhoea: denouncing speech’s image-repertoire through writing’s unreality… For writing can tell the truth about language, but not the truth about reality.” In the context of the classroom, or the newsroom, it seems that we are unable to escape bias, and our discourse is plagued by a constant struggle to redress the balance of power.

Barthes’ observations are thought-provoking, but what concerns me more than the inherent power that spoken or written form may embody, is the recognition of that power in open forum. I contend that the imbalance seen between teacher and pupil is explicitly acknowledged through the construction of their relationship, and is relatively unproblematic. Rather, it is in the media that the relationship of power strikes a darker, more concerning construction. There is no tacit identification, nor acceptance of the power relationship; rather, the news anchor, the reporter, the commentator – these speakers and writers engage us under the guise of truth, yet they are as confined to bias and subjectivity as any other speaker. For example, they may exploit this position of power, as they did last week, to declare a state of mourning for the death of a man whose name and form I had, until then, never encountered.