Noam Chomsky in one of his writings ‘Media Control’ touches on how the modern public relations industry has been influenced by Walter Lippmann’s theory of “spectator democracy”, in which the public is seen as a bewildered herd that needs to be directed, not empowered; and how the public relations industry focuses on controlling the public mind, and not on informing it.
This is exactly what Pakistani nation is going through. The masses seem to be living in a confused condition of an ill-informed mind without any clear direction on the working of government and the pillars of the state.
A state in a literal meaning is a sovereign politically organised body of people occupying a definite territory having a supreme civil authority and political power. And a government is meant to be a particular group of people, the administrative bureaucracy that controls the state apparatus at a given time. There are three pillars of a government; executive authority, elected legislatures and independent judiciary.
Executive authority in modern democracies is generally organised in one of two ways: as a parliamentary or a presidential system.
Elected legislatures – whether under a parliamentary or presidential system – are the principal forum for deliberating, debating, and passing laws in a representative democracy. And independent judiciary is the foundation of a fair, impartial, and constitutionally guaranteed system of courts of law.
The judicial power is the power to interpret and apply the law to disputes and conflicts that arise between the state and the individual and disputes and conflicts that arise between individuals. These three pillars serve as the three strongest institutions of any government and play a vital role in its running. Every institution has its own realm of working and when one institute overlaps other, it obstructs the over all system and paralyses all the state institutions.
WAJIHA ARSHAD
Islamabad
