Media Knowledge Consumers Protection

Complex and interdisciplinary researches demonstrate today, more powerful than ever, that we live in a knowledge-based society, a society in which the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge are fundamental processes. Land, labor and capital, the production factors that characterized previous societies, have been replaced in the macroeconomic indicators hierarchies by intellectual capital. Knowledge-based economy means not only the development of knowledge production and distribution, but also knowledge consumption. The new class of workers, the knowledge workers, signaled by Peter Drucker a few dcades ago, led to the development of a new class of consumers: knowledge consumers. From the wide class of knowledge consumers we will focus our attention on media knowledge consumers, respectively press and audiovisual media. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the necessity of the conceptualization of this important class of consumers and to formulate a series of requirements for their protection. Having in mind the main purpose of this paper, we conducted a series of researches on two fundamental dimensions: a) the gathering of media information and knowledge from the most important newspapers and TV channels from Romania; b) the estimation of the degree of awareness of media knowledge consumers’ protection among members of the Romanian Parliament, members in change of legislating in our country. This paper presents the results of the first series of researches, on the two above mentioned dimensions.