“Never has political 'power' less deserved its name. Never have the 'public authorities' abdicated their responsibilities to this extent on issues that are vital both for today and tomorrow.” Taking aim at the inadequacy and the impotency of those who govern us in the face of the climate emergency, these opening lines from 'Manifeste contre l’impuissance publique' ('Manifesto against state impotency') by philosopher Dominique Bourg and historian Johann Chapoutot (published by Tracts Gallimard 2022) also apply perfectly to our leaders' attitude faced with the accelerating and catastrophic damage being caused to our system of news.
This is no coincidence. For in focussing on the dangers that threaten life, this Manifesto raises the central issue of a political environment that is capable, by meeting the full extent of the challenge, of halting the democratic malfunction that is precipitating this catastrophe. Democracy cannot be reduced just to the election of representatives who can, indeed, ruin that democracy if their power is not controlled and if there is no countercheck. Democracy requires a collective debate in which the main resource is knowledge: the knowledge of reality in all its complexity, knowledge of what's happening to us, an understanding of what's going on, in summary, illuminating the present so we can see it clearly.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The presidential national convention on information
To put it another way, a vibrant democracy is above all an informed democracy. It is this issue which motivated and brought together the recent États généraux de la presse indépendante (national convention for the independent press) far more than professional or corporate issues. Organised at the instigation of the Fonds pour une Presse Libre (FPL) ('Fund for a Free Press'), and bringing together more than a hundred different media, organisations and collectives – including, obviously, Mediapart – it has put forward 59 proposals which were drawn up and discussed collectively in order to liberate the news system from the three ills that obstruct, corrupt and subjugate it in France. These are the hold that billionaire foreigners have on the profession of informing people; pressure from state authorities and political interests; and the arrival of hate-filled media in the public arena.
Whether they concern the concentration of the media, co-ownership and the rights of editorial teams (16 proposals), strengthening the right to information (14 proposals), fighting against the lack of security for journalists (15 proposals) or state aid (14 proposals), all these ambitious reforms are aimed at a single goal: restoring freedom, integrity and vitality to public interest journalism. In other words, journalism that informs and not journalism that comments. A journalism that brings knowledge and information, and not journalism that doles out opinions and prejudice.
“The Fund for a Free Press intends to promote factual journalism,” writes its president François Bonnet (co-founder and former editorial director of Mediapart), in a conclusion to the convention's proposals. “Establishing facts through verified, honest, prioritised and contextualised news is the main mission of independent journalism.” François Bonnet also cites the journalist Robert Ezra Park - he played a leading role in the development of the Chicago School of sociology at the start of the 20th century - who said it was information rather than commentary that shapes opinion and that a journalist dealing in facts is a more effective reformer than the most eloquent of commentators.
Through their cynicism and their mediocrity our 'leaders' are sabotaging an already weak and damaged democracy.
Organised by the Élysée amid a serious lack of transparency, the presidency's own national convention on information - to which the FPL's initiative was a response - demonstrates the long-standing political and state mistrust in France towards this independent journalism. Through its very nature it displays a diminished, shrunken and decayed vision of democracy which is in urgent and vital need of reform to provide an essential counterbalance to power. But that very reform - namely the right to be freely informed – has here been placed solely in the hands of the president of the Republic, the final decision maker, someone on whose goodwill one must depend and who has no procedural constraint upon them.
A year ago, in their appeal to reform state action, academics Dominique Bourg and Johann Chapoutot did not hide their great anger over the discredit done to our democratic ideal by those who are in charge of it. “Through a lack of imagination and empathy, through their idiocy and their ignorance, through their inability to plan and to look ahead, through their cynicism and their mediocrity, our 'leaders' are sabotaging an already weak and damaged democratic regime. Their role should be to serve the general interest and not come to the aid of particular interests who fund, advise and influence them,” they wrote.
The most obvious symbol of this sabotage lies in what has become of our public debate, in which the dictatorship of opinion is prevailing over the democracy of information. Through their inaction, their indulgence, or their complicity towards the billionaires who have become masters of the media landscape, the government and their political personnel have assisted in this decline. This is not only by allowing these billionaires to conquer and rule with no checks or limits; the government and political interests have also helped this degradation through continually upping the ante themselves, producing a situation in which the truth of facts become relative in the face of opinions which derive authority only from themselves.
“Rather than confronting the essential,” Bourg and Chapoutot continue, “they please the gallery through stupid controversies, unworthy punchlines and foolish proposals. To be plunged daily into such a din, into such a parade of incoherent words, of absurd decisions and shameful inaction is beyond stressful. The public arena is saturated by this nonsense and by the endless commentaries that they produce, while one scandal follows another.” Yet, they point out, this is precisely what the radical enemies of democracy - and of the equality of rights that is its basis - are hoping for.
The advent of a hate-filled media
“Flood the zone with shit,” was indeed the approach of ideologue and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who is popular with the French far right. The ultimate objective of this scatological version of a smokescreen is to disorient the public so that they no longer see clearly, or rather no longer see anything, and thus as a consequence no longer know what to do or say. They are then literally lost and, as a result, powerless and malleable. What is at issue, therefore, is not just defending a minimum of decency in public debate which is sorely lacking in good manners these days. More than anything, it is about restoring a democracy that has gone adrift, by defending the need for free and independent information.
This means an uncompromising battle against a particular French phenomenon, one which has occurred thanks to the indifference of the public authorities and the laxity of the regulatory authorities. This is the advent of mass media - of radio and television - which are in truth full of hate. Indifferent to the many fines handed out by industry regulator ARCOM – the successor to the CSA – the broadcasting group controlled by billionaire businessman Vincent Bolloré makes full use of a public asset – television channel frequencies – to spread opinions which harm the fundamental principles of the French Constitution and the declarations of human rights with which they are aligned.
The fifth of the 59 proposals from the National Convention for the Independent Press, which did not, however, meet with unanimous approval from the participants, does not hold back on this issue. It reads: “The agreements passed by ARCOM to allocate the public and free-to-air TNT frequencies [editor's note, for television channels] must forbid a news channel from being transformed into an opinion channel and must require genuine pluralism within these channels.”
In other words, while a publication sold at a newspaper kiosk or online that one chooses to buy or look at can proclaim its opinions, with the risk of having to answer to the courts if it breaches the law, a mass media that is freely accessed and broadcast cannot become a single-voiced, biased opinion channel.
This practical political issue was addressed in 1967 by the philosopher Hannah Arendt in a prophetic essay which is today more pertinent than ever. Published in The New Yorker under the title 'Truth and Politics', the essay is, in a sense, the philosophical manifesto of the right to know as opposed to the freedom to say.
In it, the philosopher contrasts the truths of speculative and adaptable opinion to the truth of facts, which are much rarer, more precious and more fragile. “....[F]actual truth ... is always in danger of being manoeuvred out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever,” she writes. While the truths of opinion are relative, may be well-founded or not, relevant or not, and sometimes foolish, even dangerous, factual truths are tangible, guaranteeing our connection to what is real, a relationship of reason and knowledge with the world around us.
“Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute,” insists Arendt. That is why, she continues, “contemporary history is full of instances in which tellers of factual truth were felt to be more dangerous and even more hostile, than the real opponents.” Her reflection ends with an appeal in defence of the social utility of journalists, as long as they serve the right to know, because “without them we should never find our bearings in an ever-changing world and, in the most literal sense, would never know where we are.”
An uncontrolled space
Left to the clash of opinions alone, a democracy is ruined, descending into all-out warfare – a war of prejudices, beliefs, identities, communities, origins, fears, hatreds and so on. It will only elevate, grow and strengthen itself by managing to place factual truth at the heart of the public debate, by exchanging and sharing. In short, by creating a conversation, in which one succeeds in going beyond oneself, one's prejudices, convictions, certitudes and even one's own blindnesses.
This is the function of a journalism following its true purpose and performing its social utility: that of producing information with precision and in complete independence. Yet it is in the name of freedom of opinions that the truth of such information is being discredited.
The freedom to say anything, including the worst and most abject, has thus become the Trojan horse for an attack on the right to know, the investigations and revelations that upset the powers-that-be and inform the public. This is obviously a global challenge as shown by the downwards drift seen on online platforms and social media, with a lack of regulation and restraints transforming them into places of ideological savagery.
Twitter, now known as X, has become the most striking example of this since the billionaire Elon Musk took control of it: it has become an uncontrolled space where racist violence, xenophobia and anti-Semitism exist, with the open acceptance of the owner himself. All in the name of a completely unfettered freedom of opinion.
In France this issue is apparent in the licence granted to hate-filled media with mass audiences and unlimited resources. If a principled halt is not brought to this, who can rule out that in our troubled, worrying and sombre times, we may not have to face, tomorrow or the day after, the kind of media eruption seen in Rwanda in the year before the 1994 genocide, namely that of RTLM or Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines radio station? Its words, enlivened by rousing music and sensationalist material, helped prepare the way for those who later carried out genocide. Registered on April 8th 1993, did the station's own statutes not claim that it extolled “democratic pluralism” and the “spreading of a variety of ideas”, in other words freedom of expression?
“A man doesn't let himself do that,” the French writer Albert Camus quotes his father as saying in his posthumously-published novel 'Le premier homme' ('The First Man'). Camus, a journalist and later editor for the newspaper Combat, said he sought to “raise the country’s stature by ennobling its language” and to “guarantee newspapers genuine independence” in relation to the power of money.
Intrinsically fragile as it is, because it is purportedly a regime of freedom, democracy cannot be about the reign of “unrestrictedness”, to use the neologism created by Dominique Bourg and Johann Chapoutot. In their Manifesto they show that this refusal to be held in check is responsible for our ecological and social catastrophes, because of a lack of restrictions on the excesses, voracious appetite and blinkered dominion of humans.
In short, it is now high time to put a stop to this dictatorship of opinions which is ruining freedom of information.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter