POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND JOURNALISM

Over the course of his life, Thomas Jefferson held two completely opposing views regarding newspapers and journalists. The original drafter of the Declaration of Independence, one of America’s “founding fathers”, once stated that “I prefer newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers.”[1] Nevertheless, Jefferson, the third president of the United States of America, wrote the following to John Norwell, in 1807, two years away from the end of his final term of office:

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper can be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts and sound principles only’. Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. [2]

Some years after the furious press campaign against Jefferson (his final dispute with the newspapers was the result of press criticism for having approved laws which favoured him personally), Alexis de Tocqueville was writing “Democracy in America”, an entire chapter of which was dedicated to journalism in the nascent democracy, which he considered to be “an extraordinary force, in which good and bad are so curiously intermingled that, without it, freedom could not live; but with it, order can barely be maintained.” [3] (Tocquevuille, 1957; Munoz Alonso, 2014).

In Europe we find two further matching examples. Edmund Burke defined the press as the “fourth estate”, not quite comparable to the three classic powers of democracy, but rather something toxic. Burke had in mind revolutionary France, where he abhorred the fact that:

They are a part of the reading of all, they are the whole of the reading of the far greater number. There are thirty of them in Paris alone…the writers of these papers, indeed, for the greater part, are either unknown or in contempt, but they are like a battery in which the stroke of any one ball produces no effect, but the amount of continual repetition is decisive. [4] (Burke Vol IV, p17 Boston 1791)

Burke intimated that the object of the authors [of newspaper articles] did not appear to be the dissemination of ideas; the presentation of arguments and of reasoning to an educated public, so much as agitation; the stirring up of sentiments in opposition to the representatives of economic interests which sustained the old order, especially in the lowest social strata, for whose aspirations and complaints they appointed themselves as mouthpieces.[5] (Castro, 2006:86)

In 1840, Balzac gave free rein to his feelings in La Revue Parisienne:

In France, the press is a fourth power within it state; it attacks everyone and is attacked by no one. It criticises without reason nor evidence. It seeks to own politicians and men of letters without the slightest reciprocity; these men should be sacred to it. What tremendously stupid things they say and do! Now is the time to stand up to these faceless, mediocre men who hold such a powerful position in their age, and who marshal a newspaper industry comparable in output to book publishing… if the press did not exist, there would be absolutely no reason to invent it.[6] (Daniel, 1987)

Two centuries on, the perception which citizens blessed with parliamentary democracies hold of journalists and the media remains polarised between these two extremes, and there are almost no shades of grey between the black-and-white views of the authors who cited above.  With ever dwindling frequency, professional journalists are perceived as heroes, and the media platforms for which they work as cornerstones of democracy; with ever increasing regularity, they are portrayed as villains, working for companies intent on manipulation and deception, or the pursuit of profit at any cost. In Spain, the Press Association of Madrid had the following to say on presenting their annual report on the profession:

This year’s report is accompanied by another survey of the Spanish people commissioned by the APM [Asociación de la Prensa de Madrid – Madrid Press Association] to investigate their opinions on journalists and the role that they play in society. The resulting score for 2014, on a scale of 1 to 10, is 5.3, in comparison to 5.2 in 2013. This lack of confidence can be attributed to the political bias of journalists and the media, their lack of independence, and the economic interests of media companies.

However, the most intriguing point to note is that both of these opposing perceptions have also been propagated by professional associations and by the media themselves. When the media, and journalists, scrutinize themselves, they are quick to find an arsenal of self-praise and tend to react defensively en masse to anything perceived as a criticism of their work. They construct an idealised image of journalism, of journalists and of media companies. However, at the same time, commercial pressures, the spurious personal interests of their corporate owners and the tendency of some journalists to transform themselves into hired guns for the company combine to overcome all other considerations, causing them to behave like an inexhaustible fount of increasingly low insults, disparaging remarks and attacks on competing professionals and companies within the media sector (Picos, 2002). A similar polarisation of views can be found in the academic sphere. Restricting ourselves to recent Spanish scholarship, we will find rosy depictions extolling the virtues of the journalist as “hero” (Bezunartea, 2007; Mera, 2008) as well as highly acerbic critiques of the journalist as “villain” (Picos, 2002; Ortega y Humanes, 2000; Ortega, 2006).