Journalism and the Future of Democracy 3030767604, 9783030767600

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Journalism and the Future of Democracy Denis Muller

Journalism and the Future of Democracy

Denis Muller

Journalism and the Future of Democracy

Denis Muller University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-76760-0    ISBN 978-3-030-76761-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

It seems only fair to say at the start that this book is based on certain assumptions. One is that democracy is worth preserving. Another is that journalism is critical to its preservation. A third is that, on the whole, those who practise journalism wish to do so in a way that strengthens rather than weakens democracy. The book was written in the lead-up to the 2020 US elections. The Trump presidency had become emblematic of the crisis facing democracy and of the failure by populist administrations around the world to respond effectively to the Covid-19 pandemic. It was impossible to say what the long-term effects of this combination might be, not only on human health but on ethical values, social mores, modes of work, approaches to public policy and the working of democratic politics. It was the greatest crisis to strike the global community since World War Two (1939–1945), and historically crises on this scale can be catalysts for far-reaching change. Might this be such an opportunity, particularly with the defeat of Trump by the Democrat candidate, Joe Biden, declared on 7 November 2020? World War Two brought about a profound change in all those aspects of human life just mentioned. The values of self-sacrifice, thrift and reliability came to be prized. Adults who had come through the war wanted nothing but peace, stability and security, a mood that engendered social mores of conservatism. Equity and social justice acquired a priority in public policy considerations that they had never previously attained, resulting in the creation of national health and welfare systems, and of international mechanisms ending colonialism and establishing global institutions v

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designed to embed the peace and stabilise the economic order. Women, who had become such a vital part of the workforce during the war, remained a significant part of it afterwards. Democracy had triumphed over the totalitarian and inhuman doctrines of Nazism and Fascism, and in time—four decades later—was to triumph over Communism too. It was the beacon that beckoned those living under oppression all over the world, to the extent that it became a kind of political brand. Countries not in the least democratic nonetheless found it expedient to claim that they were. An egregious example was the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany. It was a satellite state of Soviet Communism and one of the most repressive police states in human history. The Democratic Republic of the Congo provided another example. Despite the name, its post-War history was a chequerboard of colonialism, totalitarianism, civil war and coups d’etat. It took 46 years from the date of independence for the country to hold its first multi-party elections, but these made little difference to the endemic violence and rapine. The clamour to be seen as democratic suggested a recognition that democratic life was an aspiration among those denied it or a desirable brand for tyrants to shelter behind. It seemed to vindicate the dictum made famous by Winston Churchill in the aftermath of the War that democracy was the worst possible system of government until you considered the alternatives. That is why one of the underlying assumptions of this book is that democracy is worth fighting for. By the time Covid-19 struck the world, it was widely proposed that democracy was in crisis. Donald Trump had been elected in 2016 as President of the United States; the same year, Britain had voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. In the aftermath of these two events, books with titles such as How Democracies Die1 and Democracy and Its Crisis2 began to appear, alongside works suggesting proximate causes: growing economy inequality brought about by neo-classical economics,3 and the political fragmentation brought about by social media.4 There were long-run agents of causation. From the late 1970s onwards neo-classical economics had taken a stranglehold on economic 1   Levitsky, S. & Ziblatt, D. (2018) How Democracies Die, New  York, Penguin Random House. 2  Grayling, A. C. (2017) Democracy and its Crisis, London, Oneworld Publications. 3  Stiglitz, J. (2015) The Great Divide, London, Penguin Random House. 4  Sunstein, C. (2017) #republic, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

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policy-­making, particularly in the Anglophone democracies, eclipsing the Keynesian approach that had held since the War. Social media had begun to exert its powerful effects from about 2006, not only fragmenting public discourse but seriously weakening the mass media and the profession of journalism that served it. Social media also drained away the advertising that financed professional journalism and took its content without paying for it. Pew Research Center analysis showed that between 2008 and 2017, 23% of journalists’ jobs were lost in the United States alone.5 Research in Australia showed more than 3000 journalists’ jobs were lost between 2012 and 2018.6 There were similar patterns across Western Europe, Canada and New Zealand. Liberal democracy and the press are inextricably intertwined. Without a free press, democracy is impossible; without the freedom guaranteed by democratic constitutional arrangements, the press cannot function without fear of censorship or reprisal. This was recognised in late seventeenth-­ century England as the country struggled to free itself from the yoke of a despotic monarchy and assert the primacy of Parliament, finally achieved in the English Revolution of 1688. While this led to a disorderly outpouring of political tracts and pamphlets liberated from the oppressions of press licensing, the necessity of a free press to the functioning of even the limited and exceptionally corrupt democracy of eighteenth-century England was not lost on the founding fathers of the United States, who entrenched freedom of the press in the First Amendment to their Constitution. That is why the second assumption underlying this book is that if democracy is worth fighting for, a press that is not only free but that performs in a way that strengthens democracy is also worth fighting for. A performance of that nature requires not only constitutional freedom but financial security and commitment to high standards of professional ethics. There was never a time in the history of the press when the whole of the industry and all of the journalists who work in it were committed to these standards, and at the time of writing there was no reason to suppose that this would change. Even so, a significant proportion did show such a 5  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-01/journalism-layoffs-are-atthe-­highest-level-since-last-recession accessed 9 April 2020. 6  https://www.deakin.edu.au/research/research-news/articles/new-beats-research-­ reveals-digital-impact-on-journalists accessed 9 April 2020.

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commitment and had done so over at least the previous 75 years since the end of the War. In large part this was due to the influence of the report of the US Commission on the Freedom of the Press and to its intellectual leader, William Ernest Hocking, who formulated what came to be known as the Social Responsibility theory of the press. It was also due to the increasing professionalisation of journalism, an endeavour led largely by universities in the United States. Its model of fully fledged university degree courses in journalism was followed across the Anglophone democracies, dramatically raising the entry-level educational requirements for journalists and so catalysing the shift of journalism from a craft attached to the trade of printing to a profession, with its attendant ethical requirements and social responsibilities. While this hardly brought about a journalistic utopia, it lifted the expectations of, and aspirations for, the profession among a significant proportion of its practitioners. That is the basis for the third assumption underlying his book: that there exists in the third decade of the twentyfirst century a proportion of journalists receptive to the arguments and propositions put forward here. It was not written to be didactic, but to be a stimulus to reflection about ways in which journalists who care about the future of democracy and their role in securing it might conduct themselves in their professional lives. In this respect, it also provides a means by which those who practise journalism, who teach journalists and who interact with them as public officials or communications professionals might reflect on the way journalism contributes to democratic life. Its focus is on the well-springs of journalistic ethics as they apply in liberal democracies: the concept of liberalism itself and the values of tolerance, truth, free speech and impartiality. It is designed to assist in developing skills of ethical reasoning, which is the essence of good ethical decision-making, by providing a deep exploration of the essential values that underpin the ethics of journalism. Journalism is a noble profession, indispensable to the functioning of a democratic society, and if this book helps in a small way to navigate the crises that surround both democracy and journalism, it will have achieved its purpose. Melbourne, VIC, Australia February 2021

Denis Muller

Contents

Part I Democratic Conditions   1 1 Crisis and Opportunity  3 2 Democracy Under Strain  9 3 Enemies of Democracy: Populism and Scapegoating 27 4 Essentials of Democracy: Liberalism and Pluralism 39 Part II Journalism’s Ethical Fundamentals  51 5 Tolerance: History and Practice 53 6 Journalistic Truth: Empirical and Contingent 61 7 Free speech: Rights and Limitations 77 8 Impartiality: Attainable and Assessable 99

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Part III Press Development and Theory 113 9 Development of Professional Mass Media115 10 Development of Social Media129 11 Theories of the Press149 12 A New Press Theory: Democratic Revival165 Part IV Journalism and the Future of Democracy 185 13 Conclusion187 Bibliography193 Index203

PART I

Democratic Conditions

CHAPTER 1

Crisis and Opportunity

There was never a golden age either in democracy, in journalism or in the relationship between the two. Even so, in the four decades immediately following World War Two there was a period of political determination, even idealism, that touched all three. This period was distinguished by a belief that institutional reform would result in a world that was better than the nightmare of the preceding three decades. That epoch, from 1914 to 1945, had been disfigured by two world wars and a global economic depression. The institutional settlement that followed World War Two was designed to create this better world. It was a settlement on a global as well as a national scale. At the global level, international institutions—principally the United Nations and the Bretton Woods agreement which created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—were designed to promote stability and provide a framework for political and economic development. At national levels, the introduction of social security systems, a larger role for government, strongly redistributive tax policies and a belief in the necessity of regulation were designed to provide an economic safety net, reduce economic inequality and ameliorate the effects of capitalism’s excesses. All this reflected a belief in the efficacy of institutions to create a better society and make it work. It also reflected Bertrand

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Russell’s dictum that idealism is the offspring of suffering and hope, reaching its maximum when a period of misfortune is nearing its end.1 It was a settlement that was to last until the early 1980s when the first of a series of epochal changes—in intellectual fashion, in the balance of global power, in the global mobility of people and capital, in the sources of existential threat, and in communications technology—began to erode it. These changes affected politics, economics, international relations and social cohesion in ways that were not fully comprehended, much less repaired, as the second decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close. These changes are explored in Chap. 2. This mood of post-War hope and idealism as it affected the institution of the press was reflected in a new theory of the press, what came to be called Social Responsibility theory, and it was entirely in accord with the temper of the age. It was one of the major developments in a brief but dynamic period in the 1940s when technological, social and political upheavals created crisis and opportunity.2 The wellspring of Social Responsibility theory was the report in 1947 of the United States Commission on the Freedom of the Press. The commission had been established and paid for by two large American media firms, Time Inc. and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, reflecting a growing anxiety on the part of the more responsible elements of the American media about the loss of public trust in the press as an institution. A member of the Commission, Arthur M.  Schlesinger, who was a professor of history at Harvard University, had succinctly summed up the problem: Scandal and sensationalism began to be conspicuous with the rise of the penny press in the 1830s; they only became more prominent in the period after the [American] Civil War, culminating in the “yellow press” in the 1890s.3

The concept of the “yellow press” itself was a vivid example of the debased standards to which significant elements of the American press had 1  Russell, B. (1936) Freedom and Organization 1814–1914, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, p13. 2  Pickard, V. (2020) America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform, New  York, Cambridge University Press, p190. 3  Footnote in Hocking, E.  W. (1947) Freedom of the Press: A Framework of Principle, Chicago, Chicago University Press, p15.

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sunk. Yellow journalism was characterised by sensationalism and exaggeration. Newspaper owners and editors discovered that stories that aroused sensations of excitement, curiosity, scandal and disgust in readers—regardless of whether they were true—were good for circulation. The pioneers of yellow journalism were two giants of the newspaper business in New York, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer—yes, he who was later to endow the Pulitzer Prize for excellence in journalism. Throughout the last decade of the nineteenth century, they were engaged in a ruthless circulation war. As part of this war, Hearst poached from Pulitzer the creator of a hugely popular cartoon featuring the Yellow Kid. The Yellow Kid thus became emblematic of the Hearst-Pulitzer school of journalism and gave us the term “yellow journalism”. Typifying this standard of journalism was Hearst’s infamous instruction to a reporter he had sent to cover the Spanish-American war in Cuba, and who had reported that not much was happening: “You furnish me the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” This crude disregard for anything resembling the truth in pursuit of commercial gain was by no means confined to the US press but afflicted Western media across the globe. In England the class of newspapers known as “red tops”, because of their characteristic red mastheads, for decades before and after World War Two fed their readers a diet of lies, half-truths and occasional truths, not stopping at criminal activity in order to fill the trough. It must be said they were untouched by the ideals of the post-War settlement. If anything, they got more unscrupulous as time went on. Their excesses have been well-chronicled.4 It was ethical failures on this scale and their consequences for democracy that the Commission set out to address. What was press freedom? What was its part in democratic life? How might it be held to account for the use of its power? William Ernest Hocking, emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard and in important respects the Commission’s principal voice, drew on Isaiah Berlin’s approach to freedom, defining freedom of the press in positive and negative terms: freedom from and freedom for. It meant freedom from compulsions from whatever source: government, commercial, social, external or internal; freedom for discharging those functions required to fulfil its institutional role in a democratic polity. 4  See, for example, Davies, N. (2014) Hack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch, London, Chatto and Windus; Sayle. M. (2008) A Crooked Sixpence, Brighton, Revel Barker Publishing; Young, S. (2019) Paper emperors: The rise of Australia’s newspaper empires, Sydney, NewSouth Publishing.

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On this question he took issue with the view of Charles Beard, a controversial American historian of the early twentieth century, who had said at a symposium on press freedom in 1938: “Freedom of the press means the right to be just or unjust, partisan or non-partisan, true or false, in news column or editorial column.” Hocking’s riposte was to say that by the 1940s this “wears the aspect of social irresponsibility”.5 The fundamental principle enunciated by the Commission was that while a free press was essential to the functioning of democracy, the legal and political protections guaranteeing that freedom required a reciprocal acceptance by the press that it owed society a responsibility to use that freedom to perform certain core democratic functions, and to do so in a way that honoured certain standards of ethical behaviour. Hocking stated this principle thus: Whenever an institutional activity affects a general need, there is a public concern that the effect be favourable rather than detrimental. One begins to speak of a “right” of the public to have its news; this language has no necessary legal implications—a moral right lifts its head to announce an answering responsibility on the part of the institution.6

It is immediately obvious that the Commission was asserting the existence of two public interests: the public in interest in the proper performance by an institution—in this case the press—of its obligations, and the public interest in having news. One of the ethical standards necessary to the fulfilment of the press’s obligation is the separation of news from editorial opinion: in the Commission’s words news “unwarped by editorial opinion”.7 A corollary of this, in Hocking’s words, is that the phrase “freedom of the press” covers two sets of rights: the right of editors and publishers to express themselves and the right of the public to be served with a trustworthy body of information on which to make judgements about public affairs. In this way, the Commission gave as one of the functions expected of a free press the provision of reliable information. A second was the provision of a forum for public debate. In doing this, the press was under no obligation to present a proportionate representation of all views but to present the main alternative views on an issue and  Op.cit. p197.  Op.cit. p167. 7  Op.cit. p167. 5 6

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not to suppress opinions only because the editor or proprietor disagreed with them. An important caveat, however—and one frequently overlooked by journalists—is that it is neither desirable nor possible that all receive an equal hearing. This impinges on the concept of balance, which is discussed in Chap. 8. Closely allied to this function was a third, what the Commission called the “umpire function”, that of providing in a limited way a notion of just or fair access to the public forum by those without the power to claim it for themselves. The fourth was what the Commission called the function of emotional interpretation. By this it meant calibrating the presentation of the emotional side of stories so as to avoid sensationalism and exploitation. These, it argued, desensitised the public and robbed events of their genuine emotional depth, replacing it with “emotional untruth”. In Hocking’s words: “The more the press specialises in emotion as news, the more it risks treating emotion as all in a day’s work.”8 As a result of the Commission’s work, a new theory of the press emerged: Social Responsibility theory. It provided the theoretical foundation for the press to renew itself and so become part of the West’s post-­War institutional settlement. Since then, of course, as a result of the work of many theoreticians, many more functions have been assigned to the press in the form of various press theories. This book proposes one more: Democratic Revival theory. These theories are explained in Chaps. 11 and 12. The role of the press in the renewal of democracy goes well beyond theory. To fully appreciate what is required, it is necessary to begin by analysing the causes of the current crisis, and those elements in it to which the press makes a critical contribution. The four chapters in Part I cover this ground. Chapter 1 discusses the historical evidence for the idea that crises on a global scale also produce opportunities for change. Chapter 2 describes the contours of the current crisis in democracy in broad terms. Chapter 3 deals with two elements that have a negative influence on democracy and to which the press makes a decisive contribution: populism and scapegoating. Chapter 4 then explores two elements that have a positive influence on democracy where the press can also make a decisive contribution: liberalism and pluralism. Against this background, Part II explores in depth four fundamental concepts that provide the bedrock of journalism ethics. Chapter 5 deals 8

 Op.cit. pp44–45.

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with the concept of tolerance; Chap. 6 with truth; Chap. 7 with free speech and Chap. 8 with impartiality. Each chapter contains a deep exploration of the concept under discussion and of the ethical dilemmas it presents in the practice of journalism. Each is discussed in relation to a contemporary phenomenon that provides a specific challenge: tolerance challenged by populism; truth-telling challenged by fake news; free speech challenged by hate speech and the assassin’s veto; impartiality challenged by echo chambers and polarisation. Part III consists of four chapters. Chapters 9 and 10 set out the historical development of professional mass media and of social media, respectively. Two others deal with normative theories of the press: the functions the professional mass media are expected to perform in various political settings. Chapter 11 summarises established theories. Chapter 12 presents a new theory, Democratic Revival Theory, developed by the author and originally published in the journal Ethical Space in 2019 as Open Discourse Theory.9 Part IV consists of a conclusions chapter, drawing on contemporary reflections from historical, political and ethical perspectives and pointing to a possible way forward by which professional mass media and social media might be harnessed to the benefit of democracy and how journalists might contribute, by ethical practices, to the fulfilment of that ambition. It remains to make just two fundamental observations that contribute to the formulation of Democratic Revival theory. One is that there is a tension between the professional ethical demands of journalism and the business imperatives that are always present in commercial media. The root of that tension is to be found in the journalist’s ethical commitment to the public interest and the prioritising of it over the private property interests of media owners. It is managed better in some organisations than in others but there is no external accountability for how well or badly it is done. The second is that throughout this book, the term free speech is discussed as a right of individuals that is coterminous with freedom of the press, since in the context of democratic societies it is the press—or more accurately the professional and social media—that give practical effect to individual people’s right to speak in the public domain by providing them with both grist and platform. 9  Muller, D. (2019) “Open discourse: A media theory for the twenty-first century”, Ethical Space Vol. 16, No 1, pp3–10.

CHAPTER 2

Democracy Under Strain

Two events in 2016 provoked a burst of literature declaring a crisis in democracy. One was a referendum in Britain that resulted in the nation’s decision to leave the European Union after 43 years of membership. The other was the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. A separate burst of literature at about the same time raised the alarm about the negative impact of social media on the press and on public discourse, such that democracy was under threat from that quarter also. The election of Trump was seen by some political scientists as a step along the road to democratic breakdown. This breakdown, they argued, is a dangerously deceptive process. There is no single moment that marks the shift from democracy to tyranny. Constitutions and other institutions of democracy remain apparently undisturbed. People vote. The media are bullied, but the veneer of democracy is retained. There is nothing to set off the alarm.1 Then an autocrat comes to power because established political parties fail to head them off, even endorse them. At this point, the democracy faces a crucial test: will its institutions and its norms of governance stand up to the strain this will inevitably impose? As the presidency of Donald Trump drew to a close, the institutions of democracy in the United States were pushed to their limits. Trump refused to accept he had lost the 2020 election, alleging widespread electoral fraud 1  Levitsky, S. & Ziblatt, D. (2018) How Democracies Die, London, Penguin Random House, pp. 5–9.

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and claiming the election had been stolen from him and his supporters. He held highly charged rallies driven by the slogan “Stop the Steal”. On 6 January 2021 thousands of his supporters, incited by Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, descended on Washington DC, proclaiming a day of reckoning. They violently assailed the Capitol in a political insurrection unprecedented in the country since the Civil War. Trump responded by saying he loved them. Five lives were lost. Only with the threat of being removed under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment did he condemn the violence. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives drew up a second article of impeachment against Trump. On 14 February 2021, the Senate returned a verdict on the impeachment charge of not guilty. Although seven Republican senators crossed the floor to vote with the Democrats, the combined vote to convict Trump fell 10 votes short of the 67 required. The media had also found it necessary to take a stand. Trump’s attack on the legitimacy of the election had, in November 2020, led five of the major US television networks to cut away from his post-election press conferences on the ground that his lying and undermining of the democratic process represented a clear and present danger to public order. After the insurrection, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms blocked or cancelled his accounts on the ground that he was using them to incite violence. The crisis in US democracy long pre-dated the election of Donald Trump. Indeed the election of such a person could be seen as both a symptom and a continuation of the crisis. In 2014, two years before Trump won the Republican Party’s nomination for the US presidency, the American media scholar Robert McChesney described the condition of the US democracy in terms that were both scarifying and prophetic. The distance, he wrote, between the rhetoric of politicians and the problems afflicting the people of the United States was vast and getting wider. Stagnation, the class structure, growing poverty and collapsing social services had become givens. The capacity of people to organise successfully to push causes such as progressive taxation, health care, universal education and environmental protection had become seriously attenuated. The position of the United States as a “weak democracy” had degenerated into what McChesney and his colleague John Nichols called a “dollarocracy”,

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“a specifically American version of plutocracy” in which corporate lobbying had corrupted Congressional processes.2 These and other authors who mounted these arguments—from the United States and elsewhere—said that this gulf, growing over a period of 30 years or so, had created the conditions for the political partisanship and polarisation that had eroded the country’s political norms and conventions, what they called the guardrails of American democracy. Under the influence of extreme polarisation, Republicans in particular had begun to question the very legitimacy of their Democrat rivals. And, these authors said, extreme polarisation could kill democracies. The media—not only in the United States but in Britain and Australia too—became agents of polarisation themselves. This was given impetus by the emergence of media platforms that provided an alternative to newspapers, radio and television, the traditional sources of news. As social media became a prime vehicle for polarisation, elements of the professional mass media followed suit, either out of a misguided belief that it was good for business or out of ideological conviction. This extreme partisanship was grounded in a dispute about the nature of fact and truth. For example, the politics of the right denied that climate change was real and caused by human activity. Scientific evidence was dismissed by them as a conspiracy by a left-leaning scientific clique of anti-industrialists and anti-capitalists to wreck capitalist democracies. In the media of the US, Britain and Australia this view found its most powerful and ubiquitous voice in the publishing, broadcasting and online platforms of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Its anti-scientific arguments, couched in the language of vulgar populism where scientists were part of a despised “elite”, combined with its extensive audience reach in the United States, Britain and Australia,3 made it a formidable force in promoting the denialist cause. These elements of the professional mass media, trading in celebrity politics and extremist views, were referred to as the “conservative entertainment complex”. In the US they championed Trump, who combined television celebrity with recklessly crude and dishonest political rhetoric. 2  McChesney, R. (2014) Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-first Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy, New York, New York University Press, pp. 70–71. Retrieved 9 December 2020 from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1287jtm.1. 3  In November 2019, a report on cable television audience size in the US stated that Fox News averaged 2.68 million prime-time viewers in October, and for the third year running was the most-watched cable news service in the US. https://www.statista.com/ statistics/373814/cable-news-network-viewership-usa/ accessed 9 December 2019.

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A further factor in the breakdown was the weakening of the norm that some authors called “institutional forbearance”. This they described as the moral imperative restraining politicians from acting in ways that, while perhaps technically legal, nonetheless violated the spirit of the law.4 Here their reasoning was reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s in the Social Contract, where he declared that “the basis remaining for all legitimate authority among men must be agreed convention”.5 Institutional forbearance was closely related to mutual toleration. In this context it meant accepting the legitimacy of one’s political rivals as entitled to contend for election to office. They argued that this kind of toleration became harder to sustain in circumstances of extreme polarisation when political rivals began to see each other as mutual threats, encouraging a win-at-all costs attitude.6 They reported the results of a Pew Foundation survey in 2016 which showed 49% of Democrats and 55% of Republicans said the opposite party made them feel “afraid”, suggesting that American democracy was heading down this dangerous path.7 If it were to be diverted from this course, then American democracy would need to recapture the egalitarianism, civility, sense of freedom and shared purpose that defined its essence in the mid-twentieth century.8 Civility of discourse and articulation of a shared purpose are elements in democratic society over which journalism can exert a decisive influence. The thesis set out by Levitsky and Ziblatt provides a basis from which to argue that there is a strong ethical obligation on the media and the profession of journalism to conduct themselves in ways that conduce to these effects. In fact, journalism influences every one of those abstractions because one of its functions is to hold up a mirror to a society: to tell a society about itself, about its mores, mythologies and expectations. Democracy is a philosophy, not merely the product of quantitative exercises such as elections and referendums. As such, it is fragile, reliant on the people continuing to have faith in the ideals, values and institutional arrangements that underpin it.  Ibid., pp. 106–111.  Rousseau, J-J. [1762] (1994) Betts, C. (trans), The Social Contract, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 6  Levitsky & Ziblatt, op. cit. pp. 115–116. 7  Ibid., p. 168. 8  Ibid., p. 231. 4 5

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Much architecture of democratic institutions such as parliament and the courts is consciously modelled on that of Greco-Roman Antiquity or the Italian Renaissance or High Gothic or French Classicism: rearing columns, ornate pediments, soaring ceilings, interiors of intimidating grandeur. Even newspaper offices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries borrowed from the authority of the past, their power and self-conscious seriousness of purpose expressed, for instance, in the use of classical German Gothic script on mastheads and porticos. But in the end all these are representations, symbols of the inspirational ideals and conventions that are the foundations of modern democracy: the rule of law, equality of treatment, freedoms of expression, association and religious worship and, as the American Declaration of Independence puts it, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Where these ideals and conventions are absent or corrupted, the buildings themselves are no more than a film set, a grand façade signifying nothing. It was this fragility that the English philosopher A.  C. Grayling addressed himself to in his 2017 book Democracy and Its Crisis.9 He took as symptoms of this crisis the election of Trump and the Brexit referendum. Responsibility for the crisis he laid squarely at the feet of citizens in mature democracies. In a betrayal of the struggles by earlier generations to secure the civil and political rights now taken for granted, they had allowed themselves to become lazy, over-confident and distracted by trivia. They had become unheeding of what was going on in their democracies as those with agendas of various kinds got their hands on the controls of power.10 His proposed remedies began with a prescription that those elected to parliament needed to detach themselves from populism. He quoted on this topic the eighteenth-century conservative Edmund Burke who, in an oft-quoted passage, speaks of the responsibilities of elected representatives. They were not merely messengers or delegates relaying what the majority of their constituents wanted. While striving always to take care of their interests they had to bring to bear an independent and well-informed mind. “[H]is unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.” Grayling also proposed a system of proportional representation in order to see that a broader spectrum of community opinion was reflected in the 9

 Grayling, A. C. (2017) Democracy and its Crisis, London, Oneworld Publications.  Ibid., pp. 10–11.

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composition of the legislature. This could be seen as a means of diluting polarisation as politics became a multi-polar instead of bi-polar contest. Constitutional checks and balances, transparency in election funding and limits on campaign spending were also required.11 The Nobel laureate in economics (2001) Joseph Stiglitz, approached the crisis in democracy from the perspective of economics. He reflected on the forces that had brought about what was variously called the Global Financial Crisis or the Great Recession of 2008–200912 and proceeded to analyse the political choices that had led to the economic inequality that, in his view, had blighted the American democracy and betrayed America’s view of itself as a land of justice, fair play and opportunity.13 This economic polarisation had generated a debate about the nature of American society, its vision of itself and the vision of it held by others.14 Stiglitz illustrated his argument by referring to two large areas of social policy that in any society offer an index of equality: education and health care. In both, he argued, the American way was failing. In education the children of the rich got a better education than those of the poor, and well-intentioned efforts by some selective colleges to increase the proportion of their students from poor backgrounds had not made up for this fundamental inequality. Similarly with health care. Even after the Affordable Care Act pushed through by President Barack Obama (2008–2016) had become law, more than 40 million Americans still lacked health insurance at the start of 2014, even though America spent vastly more on health care, as a proportion of GDP, than other comparable countries.15 At the time of writing, the gross inadequacies of the US health care system, magnified by the irresponsible response of President Trump to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, were starkly revealed by data. On the eve of the November presidential election, there had been just over nine million cases in the US, more than 230,000 people had died and the rate of infection was continuing to rise. The deaths per million were 702 and the cases per million were 27,463. These figures were by far the worst in the world at that time.  Ibid., pp. 155–157.  Stiglitz, J. (2016) The Great Divide, London, Penguin Random House. 13  Ibid., p. 105. 14  Ibid., p. 106. 15  Ibid., p. 107. 11 12

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Stiglitz asserted that inequality was not inevitable. It was the result of political choices made on the basis of an economic ideology in which a laissez-faire approach to market forces, deregulation and a reduced role for government were the driving principles. This had set up a vicious circle in which economic inequality translated into political inequality in an electoral system overrun by money, and this in turn led to policies that further entrenched economic inequality.16 As a result, deep divisions had opened up in American society and weakened its democracy. This did not happen overnight. It was the fruit of a radical shift in intellectual fashion in the late 1970s and early 1980s that overturned the political and economic orthodoxy that had prevailed in the West since 1945. One of the most significant of these changes occurred in the field of economics. The principles articulated by the English economist John Maynard Keynes, on which the post-War global institutions and on which many nations had built their post-War economic policies, gave way to what came to be called neo-classical economics. This new set of principles, emanating largely from the economics faculty at the University of Chicago—and for that reason often referred to as the “Chicago school”— asserted the superiority of rational choices mediated by free markets over government involvement and intervention in economic life. The economic historian Bruce Kaufman described it as “a normative position that favours and promotes economic liberalism and free markets”.17 The corollary of this position was that the scope of government activity should be minimised. In this view, the role of government was to protect the security of the nation, minimise regulation and avoid any tendency to “crowd out” non-government participants from the free market in goods and services. These ideas were accompanied by a new view of what constituted society. An influential proselytiser for neo-classical economics, the British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher, famously declared in a media interview that there was “no such thing as society”. It was widely interpreted to mean that the commonality among individuals that we think of as “society” was illusory. Although it was clear from the context that in fact she was making an argument about people’s individual responsibility to look after themselves rather than lean on government, it  Ibid., p. 302.  Kaufman, B. (2010) in Emmett, R. (ed) The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics, Cheltenham, EH Net, p. 133. 16 17

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was seen at the time as a further shift away from the collective concern for individual welfare that had been a guiding principle in the post-War settlement. In the United States, Ronald Reagan, President from 1981 to 1989, was also a convert to the new fashion in economic and political thought. Other Anglophone democracies—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—readily adopted this thinking too, and while European countries were less swept up in the new fervour, they were not completely immune to its influence. In 1989, the triumph of free-market capitalist democracy over the central economic planning characteristic of Communist totalitarianism was made dramatically manifest by the collapse of the Berlin Wall. At a stroke, the Soviet Union, which since 1945 had been the one superpower to rival the United States, was consigned to history. Indeed in 1992, the philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.18 In the event, history proved to have a good deal of life left in it. One of the transformative forces in this “post-history” epoch was globalisation. Never before in human history had capital and labour been so mobile. A major consequence was that manufacturing was able to be shifted from relatively high-cost mature economies—mostly in the Western democracies—to relatively low-cost emerging economies such as China and India. In the West, this left a trail of industrial ruination, unemployment and a class of people that came to be referred to as those who had been “left behind”. First-world economies shifted their focus to technological innovation and creation of service industries for which the displaced blue-collar workers had no training and in which they had no role. They felt betrayed. In countries such as Britain and Australia, the progressive-­leaning political parties representing working people had ridden the globalisation wave with a fine disregard for the consequences their traditional constituents were about to suffer. In these countries, the people “left behind” felt doubly betrayed. Coupled with the deregulation of labour markets that was part of the neo-classical doctrine, they found their income going backwards.  Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press.

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In 2014, the French economist Thomas Picketty reported the consequences of these radical shifts in economic thought and action. His magisterial work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, examined historical shifts in wealth and income inequality. It is impossible to do justice to the scope of this work in a single sentence, but one statistic from it supplies a basic fact that illustrated an important cause of widespread social and political unrest across Western democracies in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In the period 1950 to 1980, the US minimum wage, expressed in 2013 purchasing power terms, had risen from about $US3.70 to $US9.60 per hour.19 Between 1980 and 2015 it fell from $US9.60 to $US7.20. In 2008–2009, this diminishment was to play its part in generating the catastrophic Global Financial Crisis. It started with the subprime mortgage sector in the US, the term “subprime” meaning home loans to people who were unlikely to be able to keep up their repayments. As people’s real incomes stagnated or fell, and they found themselves unable to keep up the repayments, the banks sold them up. In a deflated market, their houses were no longer worth the money they had borrowed to purchase them. It has been argued that the genesis of this risky lending lay in the pursuit by banks, especially in the US, of increasingly higher yields. This rapacious environment, coupled with other factors such as lax lending standards, excessive leverage and under-pricing of risk, led to a crisis in the subprime market that quickly spread to global financial markets.20 The impact on employment was spelt out in a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in November 2008. It stated that in the United States over the previous 12 months, the number of unemployed persons had increased by about 2.8  million. A similarly grim outlook was predicted for Europe.21 The sense of insecurity, betrayal and resentment already generated by globalisation was redoubled as governments spent trillions of dollars bailing out banks that had caused the trouble in the first place. Evidence for this anger and sense of disenfranchisement appeared in 2011 when thousands of demonstrators descended on Wall Street in the 19  Picketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Cambridge, Mass, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 309. 20  Mohan, R. (2009) “Global Financial Crisis: Causes, Impact, Policy Responses and Lessons”, Working Paper No 407, Stanford Center for International Development. 21  OECD Economic Outlook No 84, November 2008.

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first of what was to become known as the Occupy movement. It spread all over the world, except for Africa and the Middle East. It was most intense in the US, Canada, Britain, Western Europe and Australia, where in cities across the nation crowds gathered to cry out the movement’s slogan, “We are the 99 per cent”. Their foundational belief was that the “1 per cent”— governments and big business—had swindled the ordinary people and that the institutions of democracy had not protected them. In a climate of disillusionment, insecurity and material loss, the atavistic human impulse is to look for scapegoats, and beginning with the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, terrorists acting in the name of Islam supplied one. Those attacks, which killed 2977 innocent people and injured more than 6000 others, unleashed a series of retaliatory wars by the United States and its allies, Britain and Australia chief among them, against Afghanistan and Iraq in particular. They were said to be breeding grounds and safe havens for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups claiming to act in the name of Islam. The war in Afghanistan was launched within a month of the September 11 attacks, and 19 years later, in 2020, it was still going. The war against Iraq was launched in 2003 ostensibly because the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was said to have so-called weapons of mass destruction. Saddam was killed and his statues were toppled but 16 years later Iraq was still engulfed in what had become a multi-party civil war, drawing in combatants from Turkey and Kurdistan and military support from Russia. Iraq’s neighbour, Syria, had also descended into civil war and the combined horrors of these conflicts had driven an estimated one million people to seek refugee status in Europe between 2015 and 2016. These were overwhelmingly Muslim in religious affiliation, and in the atmosphere of fear created by the events of September 11 and a series of terrorist atrocities in France and Britain committed in the name of Islam, populist political movements across Western Europe swiftly shut off what had initially been a humanitarian approach by incumbent governments to this refugee crisis. This sudden mass movement of people in the name of whose religion so much innocent blood had been shed, added fear to the politically combustible cocktail of economic insecurity and disillusionment with established institutions of democratic government. Towering over all these anxieties and resentments, however, was the warming of the earth’s atmosphere caused by anthropogenic climate change. In 1988, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide governments with up-to-date

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scientific data on climate change. Thirty years on, in a 2018 report warning of the consequences of a 1.5°C warming, it reported that human activity was already estimated to have caused an increase of 1.0°C in the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere above pre-industrial levels. Its models projected more extreme weather—dry and wet in different places—with consequences for the habitability of some areas and a rise in sea levels that presented a threat to low-lying parts of the globe.22 Despite, or perhaps because of, the unimaginable consequences for human beings and the planet itself, and the scale of change needed to combat it, climate change became the paradigm case of the new partisanship that gripped and, in some cases paralysed, national governments across the Western world. The social contract, an idea born in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in 1651 and further developed by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benedict Spinoza, seemed to be breaking down. The wealth and power was being accumulated at the top—by the “1 per cent”—and the fortunes of the “99 per cent” were perceived to be disregarded by political leaders in many of the Western democracies. The social contract had been proposed as a means by which large numbers of people could live together peaceably. It was an antidote to the law of the jungle. Without it, Hobbes wrote, people would live in “a condition of war of every one against every one”. And the life of man would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. The crisis in democracy had not reached that point by 2020, but the extreme polarisation that was one of its defining features did resemble, in political affairs, an embryonic form of “a war of every one against every one”. It was a tragic irony that this should have been made so dramatically manifest in the United States. Of all the world’s mature democracies, it had been the one most directly inspired by John Locke’s concept of the sovereign people. In the Declaration of Independence itself are echoes of Locke: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just 22  IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warning of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, October 2018, at www.ipc.ch accessed 9 December 2019.

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powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

Moreover, these statements of principle were supported by the Bill of Rights, another Lockean legacy, in which the First Amendment asserted freedom of the press and of religion. It was the democracy of the United States as described by Alexis de Tocqueville that was to prove an inspiration for much of Western Europe in the nineteenth century.23 It was by no means a perfect democracy, but for Tocqueville it took as its starting point Locke’s idea of the sovereign people. Its political laws, he said, were grounded in the sovereignty of the people, “a legal and omnipotent fact that rules the entire society”. Tocqueville was also farsighted enough to see the flaws, saying he was surprised at how common it was to find merit among the governed and uncommon to find it among those doing the governing. It was reflective, he thought, of a fundamental weakness: “It is not always the capacity to choose men of merit that democracy lacks, but the desire and the taste.” These words seemed hauntingly prescient in the crisis that gripped the American republic during the presidency of Donald Trump, and Britain in the febrile political atmosphere that resulted in the Brexit referendum. Both demonstrated how divided these societies had become as a result of the partisanship that had become increasingly bitter since the collapse of the post-War settlement. Both also demonstrated the appeal of populist politicians promising radical solutions based on ignorance, prejudice and lies. In the United States particularly there had been signs over many decades that some of its democratic institutional arrangements were not as well adapted to twentieth-century life as the founding fathers might have expected. In fiction and in journalism words were written that after 2016 began to look prophetic. In 1935 an American journalist, Sinclair Lewis, wrote a novel, It Can’t Happen Here. It was about a populist demagogue who hijacked the Democrat Party and became President, turning the country into a totalitarian dictatorship. In 2017 it enjoyed a sharp revival in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump.24 In 1970, Alistair 23  De Tocqueville, A. (1835) [2012] Democracy in America, Nolla, E. (ed), Schleifer, J. (trans), Indianopolis, Liberty Fund electronic edition, Vol I, Pt II, pp. 91–316. 24  Lewis, S. (1935) [2017] It Can’t Happen Here, New York, Penguin.

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Cooke, who reported on America for The Guardian and the BBC for more than a quarter of a century, wrote this reflection of the US as it emerged from the socially divisive turmoil of the 1960s: It is possible that the [people] are already too cynicised … to accept any longer the habit of creative compromise that is essential to the government of the people by the people and which, in truth, has been the genius of the American system since its founding. Perhaps by now there are not enough believers left to rescue and reform the system. If this is so, what seems to be the most fearful possibility is a dogged reaction by the middle-class mass, and the arrival of fascism by popular democratic vote.25

The situation foreseen in their different ways by Lewis and Cooke was intensified by the emergence of social media as a global communications force of unparalleled power. While the technological inventions that enabled social media to exist dated back to the 1970s and 1980s, 2004 was the most significant starting point in its global expansion. That year, Facebook was launched, and over the next 15 years it was to become the most ubiquitous of all social media platforms. By 2019 it had 2.4 billion users worldwide, approximately one-third of the world’s population. In 2006 it launched the Facebook News Feed. At first this enabled users to exchange news among themselves but in time it was to become a global news behemoth beyond the reach of any except self-restraint. This had baleful consequences for democracy that, at the time of writing, had become glaringly apparent but unremediated. Also in 2006 came the launch of Twitter, a social networking and messaging platform that rapidly became a propaganda tool for politicians and regimes of every description. It enabled them to distribute material to their followers without any of the filters, checks and balances imposed by professional journalists. Donald Trump governed by Twitter. He used it to launch a trade war with China in 2019, to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and to abuse other heads of government, as well as to prosecute domestic political feuds and spread lies incontinently. The Washington Post set up a fact-checking operation to keep track of these untruths and in January 2020 it reported that in his first three years of

25  Cooke, A. (1970) “The Ghastly Sixties” in America Observed (Wells, R. ed), New York, Knopf, p. 209.

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office, Trump had made 16,241 false or misleading claims.26 As the presidential election approached in November of that year, the total had passed 20,000. There were many more launches and crashes of social media platforms over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, but Facebook and Twitter became the ones of greatest relevance to the themes of this book. Their combination of undergraduate naiveté, misplaced idealism, greed and stubborn refusal to take effective steps against fake news, allied to their wealth, laissez-faire ideology and immense global reach made them perfect instruments for propaganda and for suborning the processes of democracy, including national elections. In early 2018, it was revealed that Facebook had sold personal data on 87 million of its users to a company called Cambridge Analytica for use in voter manipulation. The journalist who broke this story, Harry Davies of The Guardian, reported that one of Cambridge Analytica’s clients was a US Republican senator, Ted Cruz, who harboured ambitions to be President. Called before the US Congress in April 2018 to give an account of himself, Facebook’s founder and corporate leader, Mark Zuckerberg, apologised not just for the breach of privacy represented by the Cambridge Analytica scandal but for the “fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech” that Facebook had propagated over the years. Social media, in particular Facebook, had a further detrimental effect on democratic societies: the development of what came to be called “echo chambers”. As demonstrated powerfully by the American political scientist Cass Sunstein,27 occupants of these echo chambers spoke only to others of like mind, often on the incendiary issues already described, and shut themselves off from alternative views, turbo-charging political polarisation. As these seismic technological, economic, political and social developments unfolded, the professional mass media became—to use an American military euphemism—collateral damage. In Australia between 2012 and 2016, more than 3000 journalism jobs were lost as newspapers closed, and newsrooms in the surviving organisations shrank or were consolidated.28 In the United States, by 2019, the website 26  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/20/president-trump-­ made-­16241-false-or-misleading-claims-his-first-three-years/ accessed 9 June 2020. 27  Sunstein, C. (2017) #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Princeton, Princeton University Press. 28  Zion, L. et  al (2016) New Beats Report: Mass Redundancies and Career Change in Australian Journalism, http://www.newbeatsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/

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newspaperdeathwatch reported that employment on newspapers had fallen by 55% since 2000 as a result of a similar pattern of closures and consolidations. The University of North Carolina reported in 2018 that the US had lost 1800 local newspapers since 2004.29 While this radical disruption of traditional news media was happening, trust in democratic institutions across the globe was falling. The Edelman Trust Index, an annual survey that tracks public trust in institutions across 28 markets, showed that in 2018 compared with 2017, there was what it called a “trust crash” in the United States: trust in business down 10 points, in government down 12 points and in media down 5 points. Trust levels in other mature democracies were relatively stable: France, Germany and Canada unchanged, the UK down 1 point and Australia down 2 points. The media picture was a little more complex, however. The survey showed seven out of ten respondents were worried about the rising phenomenon of fake news. A further finding was that while trust in media generally declined, trust in journalism was up 5 points, while trust in social media as a source of news and information declined 2 points.30 A Pew Research Center survey taken in February 2020 showed that 59% of Americans and 69% of Britons were dissatisfied with the way democracy was working. The picture was more positive in Australia where 41% said they were dissatisfied, but even here the dissatisfaction level was markedly higher than in Canada (33%), Sweden (28%), the Netherlands (31%) and Germany (36%).31 These data showed that three of the big mature Anglophone democracies where right-wing populists were in power had higher levels of dissatisfaction with democracy than did other mature Western democracies. The coronavirus pandemic made matters worse. Freedom House, which monitors democratic freedoms globally, produced a report in October 2020, Democracy Under Lockdown, which found that since the New_Beats_Report.pdf accessed 9 December 2019. 29  Abernethy, P. (2018) The Expanding News Desert, Report by the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism, https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/ accessed 9 December 2019. 30  https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2018-10/2018_Edelman_ Trust_Barometer_Global_Report_FEB.pdf accessed 10 December 2019. 31  https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/02/27/satisfaction-with-democracy/ accessed 28 October 2020.

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coronavirus outbreak began, the condition of democracy and human rights had grown worse in 80 countries. It stated that governments had responded by engaging in abuses of power, silencing their critics, and weakening or shuttering important institutions, often undermining the very systems of accountability needed to protect public health. A declining trend in freedom evident each year for 14 years had been exacerbated by the pandemic. The report was based on a survey of 398 journalists, civil society workers, activists and other experts, as well as research on 192 countries. It also reported that 91 countries were using the coronavirus as an excuse to harass critical media, a more than 50% increase on the number recorded in April by another watchdog, Reporters Without Borders.32 As 2020 unfolded, the crisis in the United States deepened. On 25 May 2020, a policeman in Minneapolis killed an African-American man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Three fellow officers stood by as Mr Floyd cried out repeatedly “I can’t breathe.” All this happened on the street in broad daylight and was captured on social media. It went round the world instantly, and dramatically showed another and more positive side of social media: its power to mobilise political forces. Within hours, protest marches began, first in Minneapolis, then across the United States and then across the world, especially in countries like Britain and Australia with long and disgraceful histories of police violence against black people. In the US, some of the protests were accompanied by looting, destruction of property and violence. This in itself was immediately politicised, with allegations that the violence was provoked by left-wing militant groups supporting the protests or by white supremacists seeking to discredit them. In many cities, police turned on the media with batons, shields, pepper spray and teargas. As The Washington Post noted in a headline, the norms had broken down.33 This was the universe in which professional news media were operating towards the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, a time when societies were struggling to adapt to convulsive changes and when the media was at the heart of the biggest change in communications since 32  https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2020/democracy-under-lockdown accessed 30 October 2020. 33  https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/journalists-at-several-protestswere-­injured-arrested-by-police-while-trying-to-cover-the-story/2020/05/31/bfbc322a-­ a342-­11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html accessed 9 June 2020.

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the invention in Europe of movable type and the printing press in the fifteenth century. In the chaos that followed, the media as an industry and journalism as a profession struggled to retain their footing in the democratic institutional framework and to keep their ethical bearings. Their place in the institutional framework was threatened with being displaced by the high-speed onrush of online material, particularly emanating from social media, that looked like news—was touted as news—but in fact was of questionable reliability. It took the professional mass media a little over a decade after the explosive arrival of social media to regain something of their equilibrium: to shake off the panicky excitement that caused them at first to try to keep pace with the incessant waves of social media content; to find ways of staying afloat financially when the global social media platforms sucked away their advertising and republished their news without paying for it; to realise that their crucial point of difference with social media was to be a trustworthy source of news, and to adapt their codes of ethics to fit them better for the digital world.34 In this slightly clearer air, it became possible to see the future with a little more clarity, and to discern in reasonably sharp relief the new ethical challenges that would need to be met if the media were to live up to the expectations that democratic societies, however subconsciously, held for them. By doing so, the media would make its proportional contribution to the rebuilding of trust in democratic institutions and in democracy.

34  See, for example, Rusbridger, A. (2018) Breaking News: The remaking of journalism and why it matters now, London, Canongate.

CHAPTER 3

Enemies of Democracy: Populism and Scapegoating

Populism has been defined as “the claim to speak in the people’s place, in their name, and convey an undeniable shared truth on their behalf. In particular, populism claims to express the emotions of a people that feels beleaguered, diminished and lost. Its discourse is nostalgia for past power and wedded to a frantic defence of identity.”1 It also has a more revolutionary aspect: the idea that political sovereignty belongs to, and should be exercised by, “the people” without regard to institutions.2 Those last four words encapsulate the danger to democratic societies. They represent an idea that is pre-democratic, Hobbesian in its possibilities. Takis Pappas, in a work as notable for the importance of its timing as for its scholarship, identified four essential attributes of “the people”: its potential to form a political majority, its allegedly homogeneous nature, its subservience to impersonal institutions, and its belief in its moral righteousness.3 Pappas argued that all these attributes were fundamentally inimical to basic precepts of post-War liberal democracy. These precepts were designed to prevent the tyranny of majority, to promote social pluralism, elevate institutional checks and balances above individual interest, and advocate  Logier, R. (2017) The New York Times, published 14 April 2017.   Pappas, T. (2019) Populism and Liberal Democracy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p33. 3  Ibid. p33. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Muller, Journalism and the Future of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7_3

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the rationality of ends rather than the morality of means. Consequently, populism led away from liberal democracy to what he called “democratic illiberalism”. He further argued that the notion of “the people”, as understood by populists, differed fundamentally from what that term connoted to liberal democrats. To the populist mind, “the people” was always a part of society—those in a less powerful and economically secure position—that was in constant conflict with other parts of society, whereas to the liberal democrat “the people” consisted of the entire society.4 However, in order to succeed in creating a majority of voters, the populist must create a unifying identity for the disparate people to whom he or she is pitching for support, and this identity must transcend differences of race, culture, colour, ethnicity and other personal characteristics. Isaiah Berlin proposed that this transcendent identity could be fashioned from victimhood: “If populists were asked who the people are, I think that they would … say that the people is the majority of their society, natural men who have been robbed of their proper post in life.”5 Resentment is a powerful accelerant for inflaming populist sentiment. As Pappas put it: In the contemporary conditions of liberal democracy and capitalist economy, where individual opportunities to gain are finite and socio-economic imbalances are common, competition for resources (e.g., jobs, social status, proximity to power) becomes fierce, which thus sets the stage for social and political conflict. Three types of adversity are particularly important: economic inequality, social injustice, and political exclusion. When people perceive themselves as falling into one—or, usually, more—of these situations, feelings of resentment tend to develop, which may in turn set social and political radicalism in motion.

The populist who could harness this resentment so as to create a majoritarian position would be, according to Pappas, one who demonstrated extraordinary political leadership amounting to a charismatic hold over his adherents: “A distinct type of legitimate leadership that is personal and  Ibid. p81.   Berlin, I. (1968) “To Define Populism.” The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. T.  I. B.  L. Trust. London, Populist Polarization and Party System Institutionalization: The Role of Party Politics in De-Democratization: http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/bibliography/bib111bLSE.pdf: 1–19. 4 5

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aims at the radical transformation of an established institutional order.”6 This reinforces the point that populism represents a revolutionary approach to politics. It was one of the signal ironies of American politics in 2016 that Donald Trump, an archetypal populist, should have been chosen to lead the Republicans, a party that proclaimed itself conservative. Race and immigration played a major role in his campaign. The centrepiece of his immigration policy was to build what he called “a great wall” along the US border with Mexico. This would keep out would-be immigrants whom he decried as “drug-dealers, criminals and rapists”. The election and subsequent behaviour of Trump in office was a case study in the strain populism can put on democratic institutions. The electoral outcome was itself perverse. The Democrat candidate, Hillary Clinton, won the popular vote by a margin of three million, but this was countermanded by the Electoral College, where Donald Trump won by a margin of 74 votes. The College voted according to state-based voting totals, not according to the national total. One rationale for this arrangement, by which the national popular vote can be overruled, was that the popular will as expressed in the national vote might result in the election of an unsuitable candidate. The view of the Constitutional Convention of the US was that, for this reason, a direct popular vote would be unwise and unworkable. In the case of Trump, the Electoral College procedure worked as it was designed to do, and in consequence installed as president a candidate of a type its procedures were designed to defeat. The institutions upon which Trump directed the most direct and sustained pressure were the Justice Department and the press. In respect of the Justice Department, he requested and obtained the resignation of Attorney-General Jeff Sessions in November 2018, having made it clear in public statements and Tweets that he wanted Sessions out and blamed him for not stopping Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia in the 2016 election. Nonetheless, Mueller brought his investigations to a conclusion and provided evidence on which successful prosecutions against several of Trump’s allies, including campaign workers and lawyers, were based. The institutions of justice seemed to take the strain without breaking. In respect of the press, on 29 October 2018 he sent out a Tweet saying the “great anger” in the United States was caused “in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news” by what he called “the Fake 6

 Pappas, op. cit. p95.

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News media, the true Enemy of the People”. It was part of a sustained attack on those elements of the established media that came to characterise Trump’s presidency. The targets of his hostility included The Washington Post, which maintained the log of the lies and misleading statements by Trump already mentioned. Again, the institution of the press—with the signal exception of Fox News, which had always openly aligned itself with Trump—on the whole withstood the pressure and maintained its scrutiny of the president. Just how fragile the resilience of the press had become, however, was revealed in the turbulent few days that followed election day in November 2020. As the large postal vote was counted and Trump fell further behind, he called a press conference in the White House in the early hours of 6 November. There he unleashed a storm of lies about the electoral process, saying it was fraudulent and corrupt, and as a result the election had been stolen from him. His rhetoric contained veiled undertones of incitement to violence. As the lies mounted, five of the main American television networks—MSNBC, NBC News, CNBC, CBS News and ABC News— cut away from the press conference, in effect silencing Trump on their networks. It was clear from what their presenters said that they were not prepared to allow their platforms to be used to propagate lies in circumstances where there was a foreseeable risk to the civil peace. America’s electronic media found itself in the unthinkable position of having to choose between civil order and the utterances of the president. The election of Donald Trump was one of the two events in democratic politics globally that were due to populism and gave rise to a sense of crisis in democracy. The other was the decision by the British people in a referendum held on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union. The vote to leave was 52%; the vote to remain 48%. The campaign leading up to the vote was marred by blatant racism on the part of the United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP), one of the leading proponents of the case for leaving. A week before voting day, the party published a poster in which its leader Nigel Farage, was superimposed over a photograph of a vast mass of non-white immigrants, to which he gestured in a way clearly intended to convey that “this is what you get with the EU.” The words “breaking point” are also superimposed in red letters, and a smaller statement said: “We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.” Within hours, social media users had pointed out the image’s similarity to Nazi propaganda footage of migrants shown in a BBC documentary from 2005. The Guardian newspaper published the two images

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side-by-side and the similarity is striking.7 As with the Trump campaign, the campaign to leave the EU was disfigured by racism and a strong anti-­ immigration sentiment. The climate of race hate reached such a pitch that on the day before Farage’s poster hit the headlines, a Labour politician, Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed to death in the West Yorkshire town of Birstill. She was campaigning to stay in the EU. Her assassin was a far-right extremist, Thomas Alexander Mair. It was the first killing of a sitting British MP since the death of a Conservative MP, Ian Gow, who had been assassinated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1990. According to a profile of Mair in The Guardian, he had amassed a small library about the Nazis, German military history and white supremacy, which he kept at his home on a bookshelf topped by a gold-coloured Third Reich eagle with a swastika. SS Race Theory and Mate Selection Guidelines was the title of one fairly typical text.8 In his writings, he condemned what he called “collaborators”, people and institutions he regarded as traitors to the white race. He numbered Mrs Cox among them. Nigel Farage also played his version of Trump’s “rapists” card in a speech in which he said he wanted to raise concerns over safety for women as an issue with Britain’s membership of the EU. “The nuclear bomb this time would be about Cologne,” he said, referring to reports in January 2016 that hundreds of women had been sexually assaulted and robbed at the German city’s central station on New Year’s Eve. Without actually referring directly to Muslims, he added: “There are some very big cultural issues.” These ideas played into a mood of nationalism that had gripped not just Britain but much of the Western world in the climate of economic uncertainty following the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. Added to this was disillusionment with the effects of globalisation as people’s jobs disappeared offshore, and loss of faith in the ability or willingness of national governments to protect their peoples from these harmful consequences. A vast wave of refugees flooding across Europe as a result of the Syrian civil 7  Stewart H. & Mason R. (2016) “Nigel Farage’s anti-migrant poster reported to police”, The Guardian, 17 June 2016 at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/ nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants accessed 6 May 2020. 8  Cobain, I., Parveen, N. & Taylor, M. (2016) “The slow-burning hatred that led Thomas Mair to murder Jo Cox”, The Guardian, 23 November 2016 at https://www.theguardian. com/uk-news/2016/nov/23/thomas-mair-slow-burning-hatred-led-to-jo-cox-murder accessed 6 May 2020.

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war, the biggest mass migration since World War Two, added to these resentments and anxieties and created a public mood receptive to the messages of Nigel Farage, messages disavowed but not exactly repudiated by the right-wing of Britain’s Conservative government. In Australia, populism took hold of the debate about climate change, destroying four prime ministers and creating a revolving door in which the prime ministership changed hands six times between 2007 and 2018. The populist-in-chief was a reactionary called Tony Abbott, who wrecked bipartisanship on the acceptance of an emissions trading scheme by branding it “a great big new tax on everything”. It was a serious misrepresentation but it found favour with equally reactionary forces in the news media, notably those newspapers and a subscription television service, Sky News, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. This organisation controlled approximately two-thirds of Australia’s daily newspaper circulation and had a daily newspaper monopoly in the state and territory capitals of Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin, as well as mass-circulation titles in Melbourne and Sydney. The simplicity of the message cut through to that part of the population who felt left behind by economic developments, were suspicious of so-called elites and who were consequently unwilling to accept the challenge to their sense of security inherent in the science of climate change. A further factor in the crisis enveloping democracy that populists were able to exploit was falling public trust in democratic institutions. Such erosion of trust undermines the faith of people in political liberalism and thus opens up space for new political entrepreneurs who, tapping into illiberal sentiments, portray themselves as outsiders untainted by the alleged corruption of the established political elites.9 Trump’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington was a vivid illustration of this approach. It is thus clear that populism is the enemy of liberal democracy, confronting a press committed to liberal democracy with an acute dilemma: how to report fairly and comprehensively the unfolding political drama that populism creates without adding to its destructive power. This is a conundrum that presents itself in a range of ways in the populist environment because of the extent to which populist politics are fuelled by racism, xenophobia, scapegoating, divisive tribalism and disinformation. The press cannot avoid covering politics, however ugly some manifestations of it may be, because to do so would be to abandon its democratic 9

 Pappas, op. cit. p127.

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responsibilities. So it is not a question of whether these politics should be covered, but how. The way The Guardian covered the Farage poster story was a good example. It published the poster, but it also published the Nazi propaganda image that the poster closely resembled, and reported the reaction to it from relevant voices, including from both major political parties. And the headline—“Nigel Farage’s anti-migrant poster reported to police”—indicated that it might be a criminal act. Finally, nothing in the coverage endorsed the hate speech conveyed in the poster. In these ways, the story was covered but such that an antidote was administered with the poison. However, elements of the media played an active role in helping to create the crisis in democracy. It can be no coincidence that in the three Anglophone democracies where the crisis hit hardest—the US, Britain and Australia—the Murdoch organisation was a dominant media player. Its dominance of the Australian media has just been mentioned. In Britain, it owned The Times and Sunday Times at the quality end of the market and, at the tabloid end of the market, the mass-circulation Sun. Murdoch wielded substantial influential over three British prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and David Cameron.10 In the United States his influence was exerted primarily through Fox News. It was a cable television channel that in 2020 was the most-watched television channel in America with just under 3.7 million prime-time viewers, compared with MSNBC’s just over 2 million and CNN’s 1.9 million.11 Despite its slogan, “Fair and Balanced”, it was unrelievedly right-wing in its presentation of news and in the format and content of its discussion panels. It actively promoted the candidacy of Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and was Trump’s favourite news media outlet throughout his term. In these three jurisdictions, the power of the Murdoch media empire relative to that of the other estates of democracy—parliament, the executive government and the judiciary—had distorted the workings of those polities so that elected officials felt it necessary to court Murdoch’s support to win office and to continue to curry favour with him while there.12  Tiffen, R. (2014) Rupert Murdoch: A Reassessment, Sydney, NewSouth Publishing.  https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-network-viewership-usa/, accessed 19 May 2020. 12  McKnight, D. (2012) Rupert Murdoch: An investigation of Political Power, Sydney, Allen & Unwin. 10

11

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Scapegoating Scapegoating is a tool for the propagation of populism. It creates a justification for the creation of outsiders and for the hate speech and prejudice then directed against them. It is a phenomenon that can present journalists with a thorny ethical dilemma, but first let us briefly explore the phenomenon of scapegoating and its place in human affairs. Among the foremost philosophers who have examined scapegoating is Rene′ Girard. His 1986 book The Scapegoat has become the foundational text for a continuing academic debate about the wellsprings and consequences of this human impulse.13 He refers to instances of scapegoating as “persecutions”, and early on he observes that the kinds of persecutions in which he is interested generally take place at times of crisis, which weaken normal institutions.14 At such times, Girard says, people feel powerless, disconcerted by the immensity of the crisis but never looking at the real causes. Instead, there is a strong tendency to explain what has gone wrong by reference to social, and especially moral, causes. Rather than blame themselves, they inevitably blame either society as a whole or other people who seem particularly harmful to them for easily identifiable reasons.15 This—the accusation of blame for the crisis—is the first component in a mechanism of which the remaining two components are representation—how the blamed person or group is portrayed—and acts of persecution.16 It is immediately obvious that in these circumstances, journalism has a large role to play in how the second component—“representation”—plays out. The power to portray is, after all, the single greatest power of the journalist. In an earlier work, Girard warns that the more detestable a scapegoat can be made to appear and the more passion he arouses, the more effectively the machinery of scapegoating functions.17 Through history it has been ethnic and religious minorities that have tended to polarise majorities against them.18 Girard theorises that communities are built on an accepted social order. Within this order there are  Girard, R. (1986) The Scapegoat, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press.  Ibid. at p12. 15  Ibid. at p14. 16  Ibid. at p15. 17  Girard, R. (1977) Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, p276. 18  The Scapegoat op.cit. at p17. 13 14

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differences and distinctions among the people who constitute the community, but these are accepted as part of the social order. However, when a sub-group is seen as so markedly different from the rest as to draw negative attention to itself, it becomes a candidate for scapegoating. Girard refers to these vulnerable outsiders as “stereotypes of persecution”.19 As an example, he instances the repeated scapegoating of Jews as bringers of plague, poisoners of water supplies and perpetrators of numberless other evils across Western nations over many centuries down to the present day. He argues that the scapegoating impulse crosses all cultures and social orders and follows the same broad contours everywhere, even though the specifics may differ.20 Fact, evidence or the concept of objective truth have little or no part to play in the creation of the scapegoat. Myth, he says, has always had mankind in its grip.21 Much of Girard’s writings about the scapegoat, and much of the literature the subject has generated, has a theological dimension. While this has no direct relevance to journalism ethics, it does provide insights into the social dynamics that give rise to scapegoating and in this way helps us to more clearly discern the ethical risks it presents to journalists. James Williams, in his analysis of Girardian theory, refers to the terror unleashed on mediaeval communities visited by plague, which blinded them to any rational search for its cause and in desperation they sought for scapegoats.22 He refers to a process by which, in a time of crisis such as plague, collective bad faith accumulates in the people, leading them to see the plague as divine punishment for some unspecified evil. To avert the plague and appease an angry god, those guilty of this unspecified evil must be identified and punished. As often as not, in mediaeval times, this punishment fell upon Jews. The ethical lesson for journalists here is that they have an obligation to carry out the rational search for causes of a crisis that the community as a whole is unable to do, and communicate the results to the public, even if the public is not ready to hear them. This is a demanding task. A characteristic of scapegoating is that the community facing a crisis tends to mobilise against the perceived threat.23 In mediaeval times, this  Ibid. at p14.  Ibid. at pp19–20. 21  Ibid. at p101. 22   Williams, J. (1996) The Girard Reader, New  York, The Crossroad Publishing Company, p99. 23  Ibid. at p111. 19 20

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mobilisation commonly took the form of physical violence. Today the mobilisation commonly takes place on social media, with vilification of the scapegoat and incitement to punish it. This punishment can be meted out in the form of discriminatory political action or by street violence or by other forms of social rejection. The ethical journalist attempting to communicate the fruits of a rational search for the causes of a crisis therefore faces several challenges. Not only might the people not be ready to hear, but they might consider the rational explanation to be no more than a conspiracy to deny people the truth they wish to believe. This can bring intense opprobrium down on the head of the journalist. Moreover, if the scapegoating unfolds in a way that makes news—by a change in government policy or by street violence, for example—then the act of reporting the news can itself intensify the scapegoating atmosphere. Conversely, telling the story from the victim’s point of view can undo the lie upon which myth is built. So, while reporting the news is non-negotiable, it becomes a question of how it is reported: the framing and language used, the voices heard, the prominence given to the story, and the presentational style. To join in the scapegoating by making choices about these matters that worsen the situation for the scapegoat is ethically unconscionable. Here, there is an ethical duty on journalists to be aware of the risk that they may act as a tool in the scapegoating process and to respond in ways that minimise that risk. The power of the human impulse to find and punish scapegoats ought not be under-estimated. It has deep roots in cultures and belief systems. Girard traces the expression of this impulse back to Greek tragedy where what a modern democracy might consider to be criminal violence is portrayed as religious sacrifice. He traces the history of ritual sacrifice in many cultures and it is not long before he arrives at the Old Testament: the stories of Cain and Abel; of Esau and Jacob. Girard asserts that the purpose of sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric.24 It is at this point that the function of sacrifice becomes entwined with religion. Religio, the Latin from which is derived the word “religion”, means “community”. Thus, sacrifice is a means by which communities reassert their unity and identity. Raymond Schwager, a Jesuit priest, has

 Violence and the Sacred, op. cit. at p8.

24

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connected the dots: “Sacrifices are modelled exactly after the scapegoat mechanism.”25 We do not need to travel any further down this theological and anthropological road in order to see just how powerful are the human forces that lie behind scapegoating, and to grasp what a minefield it represents for journalists wishing to tell the news unflinchingly while at the same time avoiding becoming a tool of those who would make scapegoats of others. Girard pinpointed one especially potent human tendency that provides the imaginative fuel for the creation of scapegoats: the tendency to create stereotypes. There is nothing inherently wrong with this tendency: in fact it is essential to our way of organising information in our heads about the world beyond our personal experience. The sagacious twentieth-century American journalist and political analyst Walter Lippmann explored this phenomenon extensively in his classic work Public Opinion. He referred to “the world outside and the pictures in our heads” as the means by which we absorb and store our knowledge of the wider world.26 He argued that we imagine most things before we experience them and that unless we are educated about them, the preconceptions we develop about them profoundly influence our whole process of perception.27 Out of these perceptions, we developed a “picture in our head”, a stereotype, which we then used as a convenient way of cataloguing similar things as they came along. It might not amount to a complete picture nor even a very fair or accurate one, but it was a picture of a possible world to which we were adapted.28 More than that, it was the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights.29 In this way, our stereotypes become highly charged emotionally, and bound up with our sense of identity. If, then, we encounter what we have created the stereotype about, and what we see corresponds with what we anticipated, the stereotype is reinforced. Note, however, that the reinforcement has preceded the use of reason. We saw what we expected to see, but the expectation was based upon the pre-existing stereotype, not upon objective observation. According to Lippmann: “There is nothing so obdurate to education or to criticism as 25  Schwager, R. (1987) Must there be Scapegoats? Violence and Redemption in the Bible, San Francisco, Harper & Row, p21. 26  Lippmann, W. (1922) [1960] Public Opinion, New York, Macmillan, p3. 27  Ibid. p90. 28  Ibid. p95. 29  Ibid. p96.

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the stereotype. It stamps itself upon the evidence in the very act of securing the evidence.” These insights help us to understand what a powerful tool stereotyping is in the hands of those who would create scapegoats. It is why populism thrives on identifying an outsider to scapegoat and then sets about creating a stereotype in the public mind that has a ready potential to form the basis upon which the scapegoat must be driven out. Journalists, whose central power is the power to portray, are in a position to influence this chain of cause and effect for good or ill.

CHAPTER 4

Essentials of Democracy: Liberalism and Pluralism

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, liberalism as a political philosophy seemed to be in retreat. More than three decades of neo-­ conservative politics and economics had eclipsed liberalism in many Western democracies, especially the Anglophone democracies. The neo-­ classical economics of the Chicago School had captivated Ronald Reagan as President of the US and Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of Britain, and given them a theoretical basis for a range of social policies aimed at reducing the role of government and increasing the role of markets in determining social and economic outcomes. Core liberal values such as fairness, equity and equality of opportunity were subordinated to the market-oriented value of efficiency and a belief in rational choice: that firms and individuals made economic decisions based on rational assessments of utility. By leaving the markets to make decisions on the use of resources, utility would be maximised to the benefit of the economy as a whole. Freedom understood as a liberal value with a priority on the maximisation of individual personal autonomy and well-­ being was reprioritised by neoclassical theory as freedom for markets to maximise profit. This intellectual shift in economic policy fashion was accompanied by a parallel shift in social policy and broader political outlook. The ideal of the collective good, dominant since the end of the Second World War, had faded, despoiled in Britain and Australia by the excesses of trade-unionism and in the wider global context by the failure of Communism, the collapse © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Muller, Journalism and the Future of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7_4

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of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of market-based capitalism. This only tended to reinforce the neoclassical theory. Liberalism had no apparent place in this triumph, and the conservative politics that accompanied it were borne along by a hardline rhetoric that condemned Liberalism’s moderation as backsliding into waste, inefficiency and unproductive bureaucracy. Part of this shift in intellectual fashion was an extreme libertarian outlook towards free speech which disregarded the philosophical constraints understood and accepted since at least the nineteenth century. Hence hate speech, incitement of violence, racist speech and discriminatory speech were accorded the same status as any other form of speech, a situation that contradicted free-speech jurisprudence all over the Western world. Over time, and especially in the US, hardline adherents to these doctrines, exemplified by the Tea Party movement, the gun lobby and the Christian right, seized control of the agenda in conservative parties and converted conservatism into a brand of reactionary politics reminiscent of early nineteenth century Europe. Reactionaryism is characterised by determination to protect the status quo insofar as it protects the privileges of vested interests and powerful established forces. The paradigm example was the Bourbon monarchy of France, typical of many across Europe particularly in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In the United States, Britain and Australia this shift was given material assistance by the dominant media outlets of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, whose commentators uniformly promoted reactionary views, particularly on climate change, which represented an existential threat to those interests the reactionaries were anxious to protect, particularly fossil-fuel interests. This was the political environment in which Alan Wolfe decided that it was time to reassert the value of liberalism and produced a counterattack in the form of a book exploring liberalism’s philosophical roots, its virtues, its contribution to human well-being and its abjectness in the face of the onslaughts from the right.1 Since liberal democracy is the basis for certain contemporary theories of the press—social responsibility, democratic-­ participant and democratic revival theories, for example—it seems relevant to include a discussion of liberalism as a means of giving shape to one of the goals of a revivified press. 1

 Wolfe, A. (2009) The Future of Liberalism, New York, Knopf.

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Liberalism as a political philosophy had its roots in the ideals contained in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government: sovereignty of the people, equality among people, the existence of civil and political rights and freedoms, respect for the individual’s autonomous pursuit of liberty and happiness. It was not by accident that Jefferson paraphrased Locke in the US Declaration of Independence. At the same time, liberalism recognised the need for laws and authority, but with two conditions: they must be created by, and serve at the pleasure of, the sovereign people, and they must be adapted to the fulfilment of the values liberalism stands for. Civilised existence is not, in the liberal view, a libertarian free-for-all. In the liberal view, the role of government extended to ensuring that everyone in society had the basic material conditions needed to exercise individual autonomy: a living wage, housing, access to life-enabling education and affordable health care. It was hypocritical to preach autonomy but deny the material conditions that made it a lived reality. Thus, for liberals the role of government was significantly broader than the conservative outlook of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries allowed. Nor was autonomy to be the preserve of people of a certain race, colour, gender or other personal attribute such as religion or sexual orientation. Discrimination on any of these grounds was unacceptable. A further aspect of liberalism to which Wolfe paid attention was what he referred to as “procedural liberalism”.2 Its goal was fairness and impartiality based on the rule of law as enacted and enforced by democratic institutions. It promoted due process regardless of whose cause was at stake. This is an aspect of liberalism that came under sustained pressure during what was called the War on Terror after the attacks of September 11. The United States—using various euphemisms to disguise the truth— endorsed torture in pursuit of terrorists, and created at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba a prison in which were incarcerated terrorism suspects without trial or judicial review. Liberal objections were swept aside in what was referred to as the interests of national security. Anti-terrorism legal regimes in Britain and Australia followed a similar course: abrogation of legal rights under the rubric of national security. These measures were generally accepted by the voting public because of a completely rational fear of terrorism, and this sentiment of community fear doubtless contributed to the retreat of liberalism as a political philosophy in the early twenty-first century. 2

 Ibid. p16.

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In one important respect, however, liberals and conservatives—though not reactionaries—share a fundamental principle: they reject romanticism. The aftermath of the French Revolution had taught them what a destructive human impulse political romanticism could be. The hysterical rhetoric of that revolutionary era completely eclipsed reasoned debate or reflection on consequences, and the massacres of September 1792 were the result. Like genuine conservatives, liberals are suspicious of theoretical or ideologically driven solutions. They prefer solutions grounded in empirical evidence that they might actually work. The influence of liberalism on the press was immense. Not only did liberalism provide the philosophical basis for freedom of the press, but the ideals that liberalism stood for—sovereignty of the people, due process with its associated overtones of accountability, impartiality, and an active role for government in improving society—were all ones in which the press not only had the opportunity to participate as the fourth estate but had a bounden duty to do so if it was to fulfil the obligations placed on it by democratic societies. As elements of the press became enthralled by reactionary politics, their commitment to liberal principles became attenuated. As this happened, the attachment by these media to the ethical norms of journalism—impartiality of news reporting, separation of news from comment, respect for persons, tolerance of alternative views, civility of discourse—likewise became weaker. This in turn contributed to a weakening of the institution of the press, a fall-off in public trust and consequently played a part in generating democracy’s crisis.

Pluralism The concept of pluralism as it applies to journalism primarily concerns what is called cultural pluralism, and a foundational ethical question is this: how do journalists treat diverse cultures with respect while not opening themselves up to the charge of relativism? Relativism—the doctrine that says all cultures are right according to their own lights—holds that because people are too accustomed to seeing the world through their own cultural and moral lenses, they are unable to make a fair-minded appreciation of cultural practices outside their own. Accordingly, judgements about other cultures are an exercise in the assertion of moral arrogance. Pluralists, however, argue that it is possible to have a sufficient appreciation of other cultures to be able to discern what Hobbes would have called

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their “appetites and aversions”—the things they sought and the things they tried to avoid—and to be able to discover the drivers behind them. This argument is based on the idea that there is sufficient commonality among human beings, regardless of culture, to enable a defensible judgement to be made by people in one culture about certain practices and behaviours in another. An example of the kind that has come up often in journalism is the debate about female circumcision. In the West it is commonly referred to in strongly disapproving terms as female genital mutilation, or FGM. It is unlawful in many Western countries and in a large number of African countries which, along with the Middle East and Asia, is where the practice is most concentrated. According to the World Health Organization, FGM—referred to in those terms—is recognised internationally as a violation of the human rights of girls and women.3 Yet for many years it was defended on relativist grounds as a cultural practice, and external judgements condemning it were rejected on those grounds. The pluralist view is that while a culture as a whole may be deserving of respect, that does not require acceptance of barbaric elements in it, nor that all people in that culture are open to condemnation because of it. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the combination of digital communications and globalisation reinforced the relevance of pluralism to journalism. These developments meant that journalists could no longer assume they were writing or broadcasting to a largely local and homogeneous audience whose culture they well understood, but to heterogeneous audiences in all parts of the world. Moreover, many countries had, over the course of the centuries, become multicultural as a result of large programs of immigration, especially in the New World. Paradoxically, however, these same developments produced a reaction that pulled in the opposite direction. The economic insecurity in developed countries resulting from the effects of globalisation, led in many of these countries to a backlash against foreigners and people of difference, expressed often in hostility to immigrants, who were closest to hand. Social media was there to provide platforms on which racist and religious prejudice could erupt into a fluorescence of hate speech. This created a social climate in which fear was successfully weaponised by populist politicians such as Donald Trump in the United States, Nigel Farage in Britain 3  https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/female-genital-mutilation accessed 16 March 2020.

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and Tony Abbott in Australia, all of whom in one way or another achieved power by exploiting fear of the “other”. It called to mind the dictum of the American journalist H. L. Mencken that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” Of course not all contemporary fears are imaginary. Terrorism is certainly real enough. The attacks by Islamic extremists on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 undermined people’s sense of physical security, not just in the United States but in all countries with significant Muslim populations. In England, terrorists acting in the name of Islam committed a series of atrocities, killing 52 people in an attack on London’s transport system on 7 July 2005, 8 more in an attack on the London Borough Markets in 2018 and 5 more in an attack on Westminster Bridge in 2017. George W.  Bush, as President of the United States, resorted to the rhetoric of the eleventh century, speaking of a “crusade” in which vengeance would be wreaked on those countries that harboured terrorists. In 1996, an American political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, published a book called The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. In it he argued that the old conflicts over political and economic systems that had been the basis for the Cold War, had been decided in favour of capitalism and democracy. Henceforth, he said, conflicts would be about culture. Consequently, future wars would be fought on the basis of cultural identity rather than on the basis of nation-state or geographic identity. Whether or not that turns out to be true, identity politics based on race, ethnicity, religion or colour became a powerful force in the politics of many nations in the second decade of the twenty-first century, most notably in the decision by a slim majority of the British people in a referendum in 2016 to leave the European Union. The violence perpetrated in the name of Islam also provoked a cultural reaction. In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, published a series of twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in various guises as a figure of fun, of violence and of oppression. These were re-­ published by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2006. In both cases, terrorists acting in the name of Islam took violent retaliatory action. Police shot a would-be assassin at the home of the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, and in 2015 two men claiming to belong to the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda stormed the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, killing 12 people and injuring 11 others. This in turn provoked an outraged

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response across Western democracies under the banner “Je suis Charlie”, in which the value of free speech was asserted in the face of violence, in the face of what came to be called “the assassin’s veto”. The chain of violence seemed never-ending. In October 2020 a French schoolteacher was beheaded in the name of Islam for using the Danish cartoons to illustrate a classroom discussion about free speech. The violence perpetrated in the name of Islam also provoked a violent reaction in the name of white supremacy. On 15 March 2019, an Australian-born self-styled white supremacist, Brenton Tarrant, walked into two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch and shot dead 51 Muslims at Friday prayers. The manifesto he published concurrently online was an outpouring of religious, racial and cultural hatred. He was sentenced by the New Zealand High Court to life imprisonment without parole. These events presented a serious challenge to the concept of cultural pluralism and in particular how it should be treated in journalism. The ethical complexities arising from the assertion of the right of free speech in defiance of the assassin’s veto is discussed more fully in Chap. 7. Here, however, the discussion concerns the associated but distinct question of how journalists might approach cultural pluralism in a way that respects difference but does not sell out higher values, in particular repugnance towards violence, wanton cruelty and oppression of persons. To help us through this, it seems sensible to start with Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher whose works on the subject of pluralism spawned a large literature. One of his seminal papers was entitled The Hedgehog and the Fox.4 His well-travelled basic premise was that “the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. It was a vivid and accessible way of expressing the difference between what the jargon in moral philosophy calls monism (the hedgehog) and pluralism (the fox). In thinking about the moral implications of these two approaches, Berlin stands against monism, the idea that at some fundamental level all genuine moral values must fit together in a single coherent system capable of yielding a single correct answer to any moral problem.5 Berlin rejected this line of thinking on the ground that it could never do justice to the range of

4  Berlin, I. (1953) [2015] The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, Hardy, H. (ed). 5  Crowder, G. (2004) Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism, Cambridge, Polity Press, p4.

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conflicts and problems encountered by humankind in a wide variety of social and cultural settings. For Berlin, pluralism offered the possibility that while there are some moral goods—some values—that are universal, others are what he called “incommensurable”. That is to say, they are so different from one another that they do not have a common denominator on which to base a reasonable judgement about their relative moral merits. In politics, one may think of social equity and economic efficiency as incommensurables. They demand fundamentally different priorities. Social equity prioritises fairness, equality of opportunity and a spirit of egalitarianism over economic outcomes. Economic efficiency prioritises the achieving of optimal economic outcomes at the least possible cost over social consequences. In journalism we may see truth-telling and promise-keeping as incommensurables. Truth-telling prioritises completeness and transparency; promise-­ keeping can require opaqueness and secrecy, as when material has been received in confidence and the identity of the source must be protected in all circumstances. Incommensurables frequently confront us with a dilemma: how to choose between two right things. Choice implies the exercising of individual autonomy and for this reason Berlin takes the view that pluralism inclines towards liberalism, the political philosophy that asserts the primacy of the individual over the collective: As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take.6

In societies where the primacy of the individual exists, there will be an almost infinite number of individual preferences and points of view, and the politics of such a society will of necessity proceed by compromise and negotiation. This can yield untidy outcomes but Berlin sees it as an expression of liberalism at work, and a necessary corollary to pluralism: For if they had assurance that in some perfect state, realisable by men on earth, no ends pursued by them would ever be in conflict, the necessity and agony of choice would disappear, and with it the central importance of the freedom to choose.7 6 7

 Wolfe, A. op. cit. p10.  Berlin, I., Hardy, H. (ed) (2002) Liberty, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p214.

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But what values should guide us in making these choices? Berlin proposed that humanity shares what he called a “common moral horizon” of universal values. While he himself wrote of these in rather generic terms, democracies in their constitutions or charters of rights have written them in specific terms. While this may give them the force of law in such places, journalists serving democratic polities or representing democratic ideals everywhere cannot escape a corresponding ethical obligation to pluralism. However, arriving at ethical decisions in this area can be difficult. As a threshold consideration, the question arises: what are the universal values? For guidance, in broad terms, we may think of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, as setting out those which are of sufficient necessity to dignified human existence as to provide a bulwark against relativism. For journalists wishing to respect pluralism in a world where what they publish may be read across a borderless globe of diverse cultures, this provides a touchstone against which to assess the limits of toleration. The ethical obligation to pluralism does not entail an obligation to relativism. Indeed if it did so, it would bring the journalist into conflict with other values, in particular respect for persons and for human dignity. There are ethical limits to tolerance, but for journalists there are also ethical obligations to tolerance, as discussed in Chap. 5. These obligations have several roots. One grows out of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In one of his categorical imperatives, he asserts that individuals should always be treated as an end in themselves and not as someone else’s means to an end.8 It was an injunction against exploitation, grounded in the primacy of human dignity, from which flows an obligation to not discriminate against people on grounds of gender, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, skin colour, sexuality or disability, what A. C. Grayling sometimes calls attributes that they cannot choose 9 and at other times attributes of birth. Injunctions to this effect are to be found in journalists’ codes of ethics around the world.10 For example, clause 12 of the code of practice of the British Independent Press Standards Organisation states:

8  Kant, I., Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals [1785] Beck, L. W. (trans), Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill. 9  Grayling, A.  C. (2015) The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times, London, Bloomsbury, p154. 10  Keeble, R. (2001) Ethics for Journalists, London, Routledge.

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i. The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s, race, colour, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability. ii. Details of an individual’s race, colour, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story.11 Another root grows out of the press’s role as an institution of democratic governance, its status as the “fourth estate” alongside parliament, executive government and the judiciary. With that status comes an obligation to shoulder the press’s share of responsibility for making the democratic polity work. Making a democratic polity work requires that its governance structures provide inclusive security and stability for all its citizens. That means acceptance of difference within the bounds already described. It follows that the press, as an institution of governance, shares the responsibility for tolerance within a pluralist society. In this context, the identity politics that re-emerged in the first two decades of the twenty-first century presented the press with a confronting ethical challenge. How was it to exercise its power of portrayal of Muslims, for example, in the face of terrorism carried out in the name of Islam? How was it to portray nationalistic movements that were revivified in many Western countries as a reaction against immigration and globalisation, many of which contained elements of white supremacy? Liberal newspapers such as The New York Times, The Guardian in London and The Age in Melbourne, sought to use language that was calculated not to arouse prejudice against minority groups, while at the same time calling out prejudice where it existed, especially where it was denied by people in power. For example, on 12 August 2017, a white supremacist drove his car into a group of counter-protesters marching against a rally being held under the banner of Unite the Right, a coalition of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, in Charlottesville, Virginia. A woman among the counter-­ protesters was run down and killed. In response, the US President, Donald Trump, said “I’ve condemned neo-Nazis.” He went on to say there were “very fine people on both sides”.

11  Independent Press Standards Organisation Editors’ Code of Practice at https://www. ipso.co.uk/editors-code-of-practice/ accessed 29 March 2020.

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This exercise in expedient moral equivalency was condemned by major US media outlets, including The New York Times, which described Trump’s words as having given white supremacists an unequivocal boost.12 The ABC television network in the US described it as the most infamous equivalency of his period in office. It was an illustration of how, in serving the ideal of pluralism, the media’s ethical obligations are not just to refrain from indulging in prejudicial behaviour themselves, but to draw attention to it when done by people in power. In summary, the journalist’s ethical obligations to pluralism are grounded in the requirement to perform the media’s role as the fourth estate in the governance arrangements of liberal democracies in such a way that diversity is not distorted into divisiveness; in the philosophical imperatives of Kantian ethics; in accepting that Grayling’s attributes of birth are deserving of protection from discrimination, and in standing up against prejudice, particularly when it is expressed by those in public office.

12  Thrush, G. & Haberman, M. (2017) ‘Trump Gives White Supremacists Unequivocal Boost’, The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trumpcharlottesville-white-nationalists.html accessed 29 March 2020.

PART II

Journalism’s Ethical Fundamentals

CHAPTER 5

Tolerance: History and Practice

On the eve of St Bartholomew’s Day in August 1572, at a time of extreme tension between Catholics and Huguenots (Protestants) in France, the Catholic king Charles IX ordered a group of Huguenot leaders in Paris be killed. It detonated an explosion of violence by Catholics against Huguenots across France that lasted several weeks. No one knows how many were slaughtered, but estimates range from 5000 to 30,000. The 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States cost the lives of nearly 3000 innocent people. On 22 July 2011, a terrorist killed 77 people in Norway and published a manifesto abominating Islam. On 15 March 2019, an Australian-born terrorist shot dead 51 Muslims at prayer in the New Zealand city of Christchurch, and published a manifesto proclaiming the truth of the “Great Replacement theory”. This theory, originating in France, holds that white European populations are being deliberately replaced at an ethnic and cultural level through migration and the growth of minority communities. Muslims are considered to be one such minority. These revolting episodes span 447 years. They differ greatly in scale, but they have in common the dynamo of hatred driven by prejudice and intolerance. They also show how deep these human impulses run, even over a long period of time. In the early twenty-first century the Western world was in the grip of populism, characterised as it had been in the 1930s by a strain of nationalism based on racism, xenophobia and scapegoating. This had its roots in anxieties about terrorism, globalisation, economic instability resulting from the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Muller, Journalism and the Future of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7_5

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and levels of economic inequality not seen since the nineteenth century.1 The 1930s were disfigured by the Great Depression of 1929–1932. A lesson from earlier history is that the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre coincided with a poor harvest and an increase in taxation, creating resentment and economic stress.2 A lesson from later history is that Islamophobia in the US, Europe and Australia in the early twenty-first century also had its roots in economic anxieties as well as fear of terrorism.3 Fear is a potent human impulse, and in periods of insecurity, especially economic insecurity, it is ripe for exploitation by ruthless politicians heedless of the consequences. The connection between fear and intolerance seems to be a fixed part of the human condition. Another powerful driver, historically, has been religious belief. It underlay intolerance between Christians and Muslims in the early twenty-first century, a revival of hatreds dating back to the seventh century when the forces of Islam invaded the territories once controlled by the Roman Empire, only to be driven out by the forces of the First Crusade 400 years later. In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush uttered his deeply ill-judged reference to “crusades” when referring to the intended retaliation by Western forces, giving impetus to a climate of intense antagonism between Christians and Muslims. Eight years earlier, the American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, in his article “The Clash of Civilisations?”4 prophesied that the world would be shaped by the interactions among seven or eight major civilisations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African. He didn’t include Islam. He also argued that the world was becoming a smaller place. As a result, the interactions between peoples of different civilisations were increasing, leading to an intensification of civilisation-consciousness and awareness of difference. This process was being pushed along by economic modernisation—what came to be called globalisation—which he said would drag 1  Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Goldhammer, A. (trans.), Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp343–350. 2  Knecht, R. (2002) The French Religious Wars: 1562–1598, Oxford, Osprey, p359. 3  Muller, D. (2016) Islamisation and Other Anxieties: Voter Attitudes to Asylum-Seekers, research report for the University of Melbourne Social Equity Institute and Centre for Advancing Journalism. 4  Huntington, S. (1993) “The Clash of Civilisations?”, Foreign Affairs, vol 72, No 3, pp22–49.

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people away from identifying with place and weaken national identities as the sovereignty of nation states became weakened. In much of the world, religion was moving in to fill the gap. He thus foresaw the rise of identity politics which were to become so divisive in many Western democracies in the first two decades of the twenty-first century and a factor in democracy’s crisis. The events of 2001 and the succeeding decades, in which terrorists acting in the name of Islam committed atrocities all over the Western world, and in which Western nations joined the US in a series of retaliatory wars, seemed to vindicate Huntington’s thesis. This era of hatred and violence, in which religion was used as the foremost form of identity for the wars between the West and Islam, demonstrated the continuing relevance of John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration.5 It remains a foundational document in discussions about the concept of tolerance, even today. Although concerned almost entirely with the question of religious tolerance, it can be read as referring to tolerance in any aspect of life. He was writing about tolerance among Christians who, as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre showed, were capable of unimaginable barbarism against each other in the course of the wars of religion that convulsed Europe for 150 years. Locke wrote his letter in the winter of 1685–1686 while living in self-imposed exile in Holland and addressed it to a friend, Philipp van Limborch, a Dutch theologian. Locke had been born in 1632 in the midst of the Thirty Years War, a mosaic of bloody conflicts across Europe in which Catholics and Protestants tore at each other’s throats in the name of religion. The conflicts were of course driven by political ambitions, using religion as a kind of emotional dynamo. Shortly before Locke sat down to write his Letter, the Catholic Louis XIV of France had unleashed another wave of persecutions against the Huguenots by signing a licence for violence called the Edict of Fontainebleau. Locke began his Letter with a pithy aphorism: “Every one is orthodox to himself.” In other words, whatever may be orthodox to one person or religion or political ideology will be heterodox, even heretical, to others. There is no universal orthodoxy. He then took some trouble to argue for the separation of church and state. It was the state’s business to safeguard people’s lives, liberty, health and “indolency of body”, by which he meant freedom from persecution, and to protect people’s goods 5  Locke, J. (1689) A Letter Concerning Toleration, Shapiro, I. (ed) [2003] New Haven, Yale University Press.

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and property. The state’s duty was to impartially administer laws to achieve these purposes. People’s souls, by contrast, were not the state’s business. A person’s beliefs existed within the mind and could not be enforced by legal sanctions. This was the business of the church, which might try to persuade a person of the merits of the church’s teachings but might not coerce. At the same time, the state had no business interfering in the rites or ceremonials of a church unless they transgressed the civil or criminal law. In these ways, Locke asserted freedom of thought, of conscience and of religious belief as being among the rights of human beings. Today, the separation of church and state is a cornerstone of democratic constitutional arrangements in many countries, though not in England where the monarch is head of state and of the established church, Anglicanism. Later Locke widened the scope of the discussion, taking it beyond religion and into matters with which today’s societies are familiar: prejudice on the ground of skin colour and other personal attributes. Locke’s examples of these seem to us rather trivial—hair colour and eye colour. Today we are inclined to think immediately of attributes such as ethnicity, nationality and sexual orientation, as well as colour and race. He warned that people oppressed by prejudices against attributes of this kind—what A. C. Grayling called attributes of birth—were apt to rise up in rebellion. Locke concluded: The sum of all we drive at is, that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.

For Locke, tolerance was not merely negative: it was not simply a question of enduring under sufferance the ways in which another person differed from oneself. Locke said tolerance had a positive dimension: it required “charity, bounty and liberality”. In other words, generosity of spirit and willingness to leave others free to live in their own way, so long as they did no harm to others. This is an important point. The words “tolerance” and “toleration” have long had ambiguous meanings, conveying both the negative and positive senses of the words. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition captures the ambiguity exactly: TOLERANCE: The action or practice of tolerating; toleration; the disposition to be patient with or indulgent to the opinions or practices of others; freedom from bigotry or undue severity in judging the conduct of others; forbearance; catholicity of spirit.

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Catholicity of spirit: breadth of mind, the word “catholic” being used in the sense of “universal” rather than in reference to the Catholic religion. It suggests what Denis Lacorne calls an active principle founded on the convictions of an individual conscience engaged in a reasoned quest for truth.6 But this is still a narrow conception of what has become the modern ideal of tolerance, the acceptance of diversity not just in attributes of birth but in what Grayling called attributes of choice, among the most important of which are religious belief and political preferences. Yet Locke set a limit on tolerance which seems at first sight contradictory to his whole argument. He would not tolerate atheism, on the grounds that the ordinary instruments by which society secured a person’s promise of truthfulness—an oath taken before God—could have no hold on the conscience of an atheist. It raises an important question relevant at all times: what are the limits of tolerance? Locke’s position, while seeming to be contradictory, is in fact a statement of principle. The principle is that society is not obliged to tolerate actions or positions which undermine that society’s civil order. To borrow from Locke’s other great contribution to the development of modern democracy, his Second Treatise of Government, such actions or positions would breach the social contract. This is a contract built on trust. Each individual submits themselves to the law on the condition that everyone else will do the same. Breaches of that trust are not to be tolerated because in undermining the social contract they threaten the social fabric. This principle may be extended to other behaviours that breach the public trust: breaches of the law, unethical conduct, and anti-social conduct that might fall short of illegality but which do harm. These limitations prevent the concept of tolerance from becoming prey to relativism while allowing it to extend widely across a society’s beliefs, attitudes and activities. Such a generous interpretation of tolerance was the basis upon which William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania. Following Locke, he insisted on the separation of church and state and instituted a fair and impartial legal system in which all would be treated equally. In the early twenty-first century, democracies faced a pressing question: should the enemies of tolerance be tolerated? Karl Popper unequivocally said no:

6   Lacorne, D. (2019) The Limits of Tolerance: Enlightenment Values and Religious Fanaticism, New York, Columbia University Press, p19.

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We need not tolerate even the threat of intolerance; and we must not tolerate it if the threat is getting serious.

He articulated what he called the tolerance paradox: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.7

These reflections allow us to draw several conclusions. One is that human nature does not change very much, and that prejudice—whether religious, racial, ethnic or any other kind—can have destructive consequences: destructive to the victim of prejudice but destructive too of the society in which it breeds. Another is that prejudice is often aroused by fear or anxiety, especially economic anxiety, and that populist politicians, sometimes with elements of the media egging them on, are unscrupulous in their readiness and willingness to exploit these fears for political gain. In the United States, for example, Fox News primed its audience to be receptive to the racial, ethnic and xenophobic prejudices of Donald Trump and then supported his endeavours to make policy out of them once in office.8 In the climate of economic anxiety that followed the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, a rise in populist politics not equalled since the 1930s meant that racial and religious minorities across the Western world became targets of prejudice: Muslims in many countries; Mexicans and Chinese in America; Poles, Rumanians and continental Europeans generally in Britain. The voice of Locke became drowned in the tumult. Terrorism committed in the name of Islam not only generated bloody retaliation but also brought into focus the question of where the limits to tolerance lie. Karl Popper, following Locke, argued that they lay at the point where they threatened the civil order or the civil peace. Up to that point, however, democracies abandon other values—freedom of speech, of belief and of association—if they attempt to suppress minorities in their religious observance, dress and cultural practices. 7  Popper, K. (1987) “Toleration and Intellectual Responsibility”, in On Toleration, Mendus, S. & Edwards, D. (eds), Oxford, Clarendon, p21. 8  Mayer, J. (2019) “The Making of the Fox News White House”, New Yorker, 4 March 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-­­ news-white-house accessed 7 April 2020.

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The collision between free speech and the protection of the civil peace can confront democracies—and their press—with a life-and-death dilemma, as the discussion of the “assassin’s veto” in Chap. 7 shows. It raises the questions of how, and to what extent, does the press exercise its freedom to publish when circumstances indicate that what they publish might provoke violent retaliation with risks to the safety of innocent people? Here we have surely reached the point where tolerating such intolerance is out of the question, but confronting such intolerance raises life-and-death dilemmas. Well before we reach that point, the principle of tolerance presents journalists with many other ethical questions. When is it justified to refer to a person’s attributes of birth or of choice? The standard test is one of relevance: how relevant is the attribute to the story? In referring to such attributes, how is stereotyping to be avoided? How and on what basis do ethical journalists report words, actions and events that have a tendency to spread hatred or inflame a volatile situation? A basis may be provided by reference to a public-interest test, but that does not solve the problem of how the matter in question is reported. Here the inclusion of context and counterspeech may assist, as exemplified by The Guardian in the reporting of the UKIP poster on immigration during the Brexit referendum campaign, referred to in Chap. 3. What, if anything, should the press do to see that minority voices are heard? What should be the press’s attitude to majoritarianism? The principles of fairness and diversity may assist in arriving at answers to these two questions. Tolerance is also assisted by openmindedness, one of the elements of impartiality discussed in Chap. 8.

CHAPTER 6

Journalistic Truth: Empirical and Contingent

On the gravestone of Simon Agranat, one of Israel’s greatest chief justices, is inscribed in Hebrew a phrase from the Talmud which translates approximately as “Justice Simon Agranat, who judged the truth truthfully”.1 Like lawyers, scientists and numberless other professional people, journalists do not have the luxury of playing philosophical games with the concept of truth. Their task is to report the truth truthfully. Yet truth’s complexities are real and it is worthwhile exploring them from a journalistic perspective. Facts—verified by reference to an appropriate form of proof—are an essential starting point. But facts, left to themselves, can create a bald and even misleading narrative. Facts left to themselves can create meanings that might have nothing to do with truth. Meaning is as essential to journalistic truth-telling as facts. Meaning is created not just by the recitation of facts but also by the words and syntax used to express them. This imports the value of fairness into the concept of journalistic truth: what words are chosen and what order are they arranged in to convey the intended meaning? So already there are three components to journalistic truth-telling: verified facts, constructed meaning and fairness. Before exploring each of these in greater depth, it is important to define the kind of truth that is relevant to journalism. Journalistic truth is empirical, not metaphysical; 1  Lahav, P. (1997) Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Berkeley, University of California Press, p. 250.

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grounded in evidence and contingent: that is to say, if the evidence changes, the truth changes. It is also fragile, dependent on human processes of persuasion and historical context, what has been called Sophisticated Modernism.2 This approach allows us to retain a healthy scepticism about the absoluteness of any “truth” while not giving up on the idea that journalistic truth as defined here is attainable. It is dangerous not just to democracy but to social life generally to passively accept that twenty-first century society lives in a “post-truth” age. It does not. Truth is as important to the workings of society now as it has been since Hobbes,3 Locke4 and Rousseau,5 agonised over how large groups of people could live in peace, and arrived at the concept of the social contract. Abandonment of truth undermines the foundations of trust on which the social contract rests. These three philosophers bequeathed to journalists a deontological, or duty-based, ethical obligation to truth-telling. This ethic is supplemented by the consequentialist ethic of Utilitarianism, which imposes a number of truth-oriented requirements on journalism: a commitment to impartiality (explored further in Chap. 8), to transparency of process and to integrity, all of which are necessary to meeting the public interest that inheres in Utilitarianism. A further ethical obligation to truth-telling arises for journalists from their fourth-estate function of holding power to account. The philosopher Hannah Arendt drew attention to this long before the corrosive concept of a “post-truth age” emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century. She stated that truth was threatened by power, and that this was especially the case where factual truth was concerned. Factual truth was truth based on actions and events which were open to interpretation rather than the kind of truth based on mathematical calculation.6 Michael Schudson, building on Arendt’s argument half a century later, repudiated the proposition that factual truth was dead. This was not the case, he said, 2  Schiappa, E. (2019) ‘Spotlight: Sophisticated Modernism and Truth’ in Katz, J. & Mays K. (eds), Journalism and Truth in an Age of Social Media, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 81. 3  Hobbes, T. [1651] Leviathan, MacPherson, C. B. (ed), London, Penguin, 1985. 4  Locke, J. [1728] ‘Two Treatises on Government’ republished in The Works of John Locke (twelfth edition) (1824) London. 5  Rousseau, J.  J. The Social Contract [1762], Betts, C. (trans) (1994) Oxford, Oxford University Press. 6  Arendt, H. (1968) Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York, Viking Press.

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so long as the interests of power could be prevented from having the last say.7 It follows that in holding power to account, journalists should see to it that where factual truth is concerned, power does not have the last word. A true statement is a statement that is true to the facts. The property of being true is explained by a relation between a statement and something else, such as a mother is someone who is the mother of someone. The statement corresponds factually to something else. The twentieth-century philosopher Donald Davidson called this the correspondence theory of truth. While acknowledging various philosophical objections to this simple idea of truth, Davidson defended a version of it, as follows: I think truth can be explained by appeal to a relation between language and the world, and that analysis of that relation yields insight into how, by uttering sentences, we sometimes manage to say what is true.8

He expanded on the language element by saying: Statements are true or false because of the words used in making them, and it is words that have interesting, detailed, conventional connections to the world.9

This analysis shows up the Trump White House’s concept of “alternative facts” for the absurdity that it is. It is also a violation of Gottlob Frege’s norm of truth, which distinguished “the true” from what is claimed to be true. As Julie Floyd has argued, Frege’s norm of truth is a norm of journalism, to be pursued even in the face of danger, risk or unpopularity. A further important aspect of the language element is what Frege referred to as the “colour” of a statement: the tone, specific choices of words, the conversational implicatures, body language, gestures, facial gestures.10 The importance of these aspects of truth becomes magnified in the world of social media where text, audio and vision all combine to

7  Schudson, M. (2019) “Belgium Invades Germany: Can facts Survive Politics?” in Katz, J. & Mays, K. (eds) Journalism and Truth in an Age of Social Media, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 21–35. 8  Davidson, D. (2001) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 2nd ed., Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp. 37–38. 9  Davidson, D. (2001) op. cit., p. 43. 10  Floyd, J. (2019) ‘“The True” in Journalism’, in Journalism and Truth in the Age of Social Media, Katz, J. & Mays, K. (eds), Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 93–94.

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c­ onvey messages, the truth of which could be influenced by the colourations Frege spoke of. A further aspect to be considered in any discussion of truthfulness or falsity of communication is that of intent. Sissela Bok’s definition of lying captures its importance: I shall define as a lie any intentionally deceptive message which is stated (her emphasis). Such statements are most often made verbally or in writing, but can of course also be conveyed via smoke signals, Morse code, sign language and the like.11

Putting these two aspects of truth-telling—or conversely lying— together, we can see that intentionality itself has two parts: intentionality of meaning and intentionality concerning the effect the statement has on the hearer. The first part is determined by the choice of words and syntax to create meaning, and the second is determined by how the utterer intends the statement to be received by the hearer. Is it the intention to inform truthfully, to mislead or to beguile? The construction of meaning is itself an element in journalistic truth-­ telling requiring further explication. Davidson developed a highly influential approach to the theory of meaning. His approach was to show how the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of the words that constitute it and the way in which those words are organised. He described this as “compositional” meaning.12 The composition consisted of a chosen set of words placed in a chosen syntactical arrangement. He also asserted that a theory of truth was closely associated with any theory of meaning. His theory of truth, for this purpose, was that anyone who understood a language would know that certain words and syntactical constructions of those words had established meanings assigned to them. Davidson’s propositions rest on an empirical base. Established meanings exist because they are what users of a language have observed those particular words and syntactical constructions to have usually conveyed to other users of that language. This in turn creates constraints: a user of a word or a particular syntactical construction will find it difficult to argue that they convey a meaning other than that already established as being 11  Bok, S. (1999) Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, New  York, Vintage Books, p. 13. 12  Davidson, D. (2001) op. cit. pp 21–23.

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usual. An axiom in defamation law says: “The man who wants to talk about smoke will need to take great care to ensure that he is not also understood to be talking about fire.” Empiricism also played a central part in Habermas’s concept of “pragmatic epistemological realism”. If a statement for which we claim truth is indeed true, it is so because it accurately refers to existing objects, or accurately represents actual states of affairs.13 Of course these propositions do not exclude the possibility of indeterminate, ambiguous or unintended meanings. All communication is open to misunderstanding or misinterpretation. The signal sent may not be the signal received, since the reception is open to being filtered and interpreted according to the receiver’s own world view, understanding of the issue at hand, or grasp of the language. A.  C. Grayling referred to people’s understanding of a sentence as having a “recognitional capacity”. This had two parts: what the speaker knows in “knowing the meaning” of expressions he employs, and knowing the use to which it can be put.14 A further consideration concerns the strict meaning of a statement. For example, it is common for people alleged to have committed some wrong to respond by saying, “That allegation cannot be sustained.” Clearly those words are open to the interpretation that the allegation is false, but it is not what the statement says. It says merely that it cannot be proved. It may mean that there can be no proof because the allegation is baseless or simply that the speaker thinks he has covered his tracks. Vigilant journalists ask the speaker the obvious question: which meaning does the speaker intend us to take? These considerations show us how carefully journalists must attend to compositional meaning. There is an ethical obligation to ensure the meaning conveyed by a story accords with Davidson’s empirical truth-theory: that words and phrases have accepted meanings which cannot be ignored in the task of truth-telling. This applies both in the gathering and interpretation of material and in the presentation of it to the audience. A further essential element in establishing truth-value for a statement is the understanding the journalist has of the meaning he or she is creating. Michael Dummett developed a theory of meaning that rested on the proposition that speakers and writers have some prior understanding of 13  Habermas, J. (2003) Truth and Justification, Fultner, B. (trans), Cambridge MA, MIT Press, p7. 14  Grayling, A. C. (2019) The History of Philosophy, London, Penguin Viking, pp. 419–425.

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what they intend to convey and of the uses their meaning can be put to.15 This approach creates a connection between knowing the meaning and anticipating the uses to which that meaning can be put. To illustrate this point, consider the phrase “For all of us.” It was adopted by an Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, as the slogan for an Australian federal election campaign in which immigration and race were highly salient issues. To one set of ears, “For all of us” sounded inclusive but to another, tuned to a different socio-political frequency, it referred to the Anglo-Celtic majority in the Australian population. This is the phenomenon known as “dog-whistling”: a statement is intended to be heard differently according to the attitudes and predispositions of different hearers, and in that way to beguile them into thinking that the statement accords with their own worldview. Given the political context, and the fact that the phrase was developed by campaign publicists to promote an anti-immigration and racially selective policy, it may be safely assumed that Howard and his people understood it to convey to people predisposed to share his party’s attitudes the esoteric meaning that Howard’s party would administer immigration policy in accordance with the wishes of the Anglo-Celtic majority’s views on race. This turns on the meaning of the word “us”. To a voter opposed to immigration, it might be taken to refer to persons already established in the country and in particular to the white Anglo-Celtic segment of that established population, the “us” having been uttered by a politician already notorious for using the issue of Asian immigration as a political weapon. In this way, the surface meaning can be used as a means of cloaking the esoteric meaning in innocence. Who could possibly object to such an inclusive statement as “For all of us”? But look deeper and its meaning might be open to condemnation as racially discriminatory. Paul Grice’s communication-intention theory of meaning is apt here. His theory is concerned with the effect the speaker or writer intends to produce in the audience, what he called “utterer’s meaning”.16 In the case described above, the utterer intends to produce in some hearers the ideal of social inclusion and in others the opposite: the ideal of social exclusion. It is truth of a certain kind inasmuch as it states a promise, but it leaves open the question of exactly what that promise is. It is a slippery version  Dummett, M. (1978) Truth and Other Enigmas, Worcester, Duckworth, p. 3.  Grice, H. P. (1969), ‘Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions’, The Philosophical Review, 68, pp. 147–77. 15 16

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of truth-telling, and it calls forth the need for the ethical journalist to tell the truth about the truth, as it were: in other words, to explicate both the surface and esoteric meanings. The ethical obligation to do so arises from the power of the journalist to determine what will count as knowledge in respect of this utterance. This is an expression of the central power of the journalist, namely the power to portray, and incomplete portrayal is a form of distortion. It is thus incumbent on the journalist to be vigilant and sceptical in developing portrayals of what utterers intend to have accepted as truth and lay out for their audience all these possibilities. There is a vast literature stretching back to Machiavelli’s The Prince on the subject of truth and lying in public life. Much of it concerns the question of whether lying is an essential part of politics. For the purposes of this discussion it is necessary to identify journalism’s position in public life and its relationship to politics. Journalism is part of the public life of a democracy, as being the profession which serves the institution of the press, enabling it to fulfil its function of providing the community with the information it needs to be self-governing in the Lockean sense. As such, it is in the field of politics because what it produces is in part generated by the political process and because what it produces influences, and is a necessary part of, the political process. But journalism is not of politics: politics is neither its essence nor representative of anything like the full scope of what journalism does. Journalism is about many things other than politics. This distinction is important because whatever justifications may be advanced for lying in politics—and there are many—it is a categorical error to apply them also to journalism. To see the fundamental distinction between the two more clearly, we may turn to Machiavelli. He assumed that the goals of politics were the acquiring and holding of power, the stability and longevity of the state, the preservation of order, and general prosperity. Each and all of these can be seen as having some place in the goals of the press, but none of them is a primary goal, nor do any of them represent the raison d’etre of the press in a democratic polity. The primary goal of journalism in a democracy is to provide information to the people so that, in fulfilment of the theory of John Locke, the people may exercise sovereign power. Moreover, journalism stands outside what Machiavelli called the “autonomy of politics”. By this he means—to use his own words—that politics exists in a realm “beyond good and evil”, where actions are judged without reference to morality and instead on an entirely

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utilitarian criterion. It follows that if a political act is done in pursuit of one of the goals of politics that Machiavelli defines, then its rightness is to be judged entirely on whether it succeeds in accomplishing that goal. If it succeeds, it may be judged right; if it fails it may be judged wrong. On this consequentialist view, morality does not enter the calculation. There is plenty of evidence to show that, in practice, politics does indeed follow this Machiavellian doctrine. In their account of a few of the more egregious acts of dishonesty committed by Western governments in pursuit of these goals, Cliffe et al. demonstrated where this self-justifying and self-referential doctrine can lead.17 These include the sustained lies told by successive US administrations in support of the Vietnam War; the lies and cover-up that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon as US president in the Watergate scandal; the connivance of successive British governments and British industrialists in selling arms to Iran and Iraq in contravention of the government’s own proclaimed neutrality in a war between those two countries; and the use of civil foreign aid programmes by the British government as leverage to sell arms to recipient countries. As Cliffe et  al argued, none of these scandalously dishonest activities could be remotely justified by considerations of realpolitik, the pursuit of successful public policy or—least of all—by considerations of public interest. They were driven instead by venal considerations: saving face in Vietnam, gratifying Nixon’s desire to be re-elected, and making money for British armaments manufacturers. All were surrounded by utmost secrecy. Thus the public was kept ignorant about what was really going on, and governments were shielded from accountability.18 This is anathema to the obligations of journalism. Journalism’s contribution to truth in public life consists in both a positive and a negative duty. The wrongs described above came to light in part because of journalism’s positive duty to the truth: exposing the words and deeds of others. The negative duty is to avoid telling lies on its own account or to knowingly or negligently propagate the lies of others or to otherwise mislead its audience by distortion or exaggeration. In many of the cases cited by Cliffe et al, it was journalism’s pursuit of its positive duty

17  Cliffe, L., Ramsay, M. and Bartlett, D. (2000) The Politics of Lying, Basingstoke, Macmillan. 18  Ibid. at p. 209.

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to truth that created a political climate in which it became impossible to continue the deception.19 Bok also discussed the concept of lying for the public good. She took a radically different perspective from Machiavelli’s. She began by asking under what circumstances did lying in public life undermine trust most grievously?20 She also argued for a broad definition of what constitutes lying. She rejected a definition that required both that a statement be made with the intention to deceive others and that the statement itself be false. It was sufficient, in her view, that there be an intention to deceive, for example, by making a statement that might not be entirely false but which is couched in such terms as to mislead21: When we undertake to deceive others intentionally, we communicate messages meant to mislead them, meant to make them believe what we ourselves do not believe.22

The Machiavellian view justified deception in political life as sometimes necessary if the goals of politics were to be attained. Here he was implicitly invoking the concept of the “noble lie”, a lie told to the people on the basis that it was in their interests to be lied to because a public good might eventually come of it. Erasmus of Rotterdam, who in some ways was journalism’s founding father, had no patience for this. The politician who told “deceitful fictions to the rabble” did so in order that the people might not rise up in opposition to a proposed course of action or in protest at actions already taken.23 Examples of this abounded in the early twenty-first century, especially in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. To take one example among many, in 2003 the United States, Britain and Australia led a so-called coalition of the willing in invading Iraq on the basis that it had developed weapons of mass destruction, a proposition that was known to be false before the invasion took place but upon which the voters in all three countries were lied to by their respective governments.  Ibid. at pp. 215–216.  Bok, S. (1999), Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life, New  York, Vintage Books, p. xvi. 21  Ibid., p. xxv. 22  Ibid., p. 13. 23  Erasmus (1706; 1962) Responsio ad Albertum Pium, vol 9, Leiden; Hildesheim. 19 20

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The centrality of truth-telling to the effective functioning of democracy was comprehensively examined by Sophia Rosenfeld in a book that took as its starting point the strong current of thought in the first two decades of the twenty-first century that democracy was in trouble and that the roots of this trouble extended to its very foundations.24 The fact that there was inspiration for such a book in the first place reflected the global concern about the effects of unbridled and unaccountable social media combined with an era of populist politics. These forces had spawned, enabled and exploited the phenomenon that came to be called “fake news”. Rosenfeld made the obvious but necessary point that ordinary people have to rely on elected officials and people with recognised expertise in various fields to supply what she called “the preliminary factual truths that they needed to make well-reasoned judgments at the ballot box”.25 In modern democracies, it was the function of the press to be the means by which this is done. In turn, people needed to be able to trust that the information was accurate in the first place and had been faithfully conveyed. How this was done was the responsibility of democratic institutions and would shape the way people talked with one another about public issues. The ideal, she said, was a language in which the correspondence between signs and reality came as close to exact as could be: echoes of Davidson’s correspondence theory of truth. While the truth-telling function of the press had long been claimed by journalists as providing a justification for the protections it enjoyed in democratic polities, the reality was that the press’s performance in this regard had often succumbed to less noble incentives, in particular the incentive to increase sales and ratings. Especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, when advances in technology provided the means by which newspapers, and later radio and television, could reach mass audiences with the associated appeal to advertisers, sensationalism, lies and entirely fictitious “news” stories corrupted the truth-telling mission. This led Rosenfeld to conclude that there was a particular historical crisis in the relationship between democracy and truth.26 There was, perhaps a glimmer of hope in the fact that although the crisis in unreliability reached a particularly sharp pitch in the first two 24  Rosenfeld, S. (2019) Democracy and Truth, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 4. 25  Ibid., p. 30. 26  Ibid., p. 41.

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decades of the twenty-first century, history showed that democratic societies had been there before. Rosenfeld reminded us that in the earliest decades of the American republic, the press participated in a divisive and vituperative public debate in which lies and half-truths abounded.27 The nature of truth is a constituent element in all theories of the press.28 As discussed more fully in Chap. 11, for authoritarian societies, truth was what the governing elite said it was and their theory of the press stated that the press existed to faithfully publish that truth, and make no room for dissent. Tyrannies such as the Soviet Union added their own modifications to this basic theory. They asserted that not only was there one truth—the truth decided upon by the governing elite—but that the press had a duty to instruct the people in this truth and in how to apply it to circumstances as they arose. The Nazis put it simply: There is one truth— truth for us. Diametrically opposed to this was libertarian theory, founded on Enlightenment principles and augmented by the counterspeech arguments of Mill and Milton: that truth would be distilled from a contest of ideas. If this is to be accepted, even in principle, a further proposition must be accepted: that all inputs to a debate are deserving of a place, not just those of an imagined enlightened elite. For centuries, this proposition was accepted by journalists and put into practice by them as part of their professional commitment to impartiality. This was part of a tacit acceptance both in politics and in the wider community that lying or the deliberate spreading of misinformation in public debate amounted to scandalous behaviour. Public figures caught lying— Richard Nixon comes immediately to mind—were hounded from office by political pressure. In the Westminster system, lying to parliament was considered a sackable offence. Journalists caught lying or falsifying material received the same fate, at least on serious and reputable media platforms. In 2003, a New York Times journalist resigned when it was found that some of his stories were fabrications. In 1984, a journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald was dismissed for inventing a story based on a fabricated interview with four HIV/AIDS patients who had watched Sydney’s Gay Mardi Gras from the safety of a motel room.

 Ibid., pp. 36, 56.  See Siebert, F., Peterson, T. & Schramm, W. (1963) Four Theories of the Press, Urbana, University of Illinois Press. 27 28

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By the 2020s, however, this tacit acceptance about the importance attached to truth-telling in public life seemed to have become attenuated and the consequences of lying in public life had become correspondingly weakened, even non-existent. The paradigm case was that of Donald Trump. However, there was no apparent diminishment in voter support for him and, at the threshold of a presidential election year in 2020, it was considered likely that he would be re-elected. Many factors were responsible for this decline in standards in public life not just in respect of truth but in general behaviour. One was a decline in standards of probity among public officials to what appeared to be a new normal, in which it was taken for granted that they would lie or cover up wrongdoing and then simply brazen it out until the 24/7 news cycle moved journalistic and public attention on to a new distraction. Another was the readiness of journalists in the first years of social media to jettison prior verification of information and publish untested material in order to try to keep up with the swift and unending tide of social media clickbait. Public trust in these institutions of democracy, already low because of decades of abuse, fell still further. This created a political terrain in which the traditional wayfinders of truth were absent, allowing politicians and some elements of the media to roam at large, spreading disinformation and misinformation in circumstances where the public had no markers or compass bearings against which to reckon what was true and what was false. As trust in these established sources of information declined, so did trust in other established sources of information, including peer-reviewed academic research. Counterspeech in the form of populist positions on such issues as global warming and the vaccination of children, both of which contradicted overwhelming scientific evidence, began to gain currency. On global warming, the counterspeech took several forms. One was that the warming was merely part of long-run variations in the climate; another was that “warmism”, as it was contemptuously called, was an ideology cooked up by the extreme left as a means of destroying capitalism. On vaccination, the counterspeech was that it caused autism in children. This was based on a discredited article published in 1998 by the British medical journal, The Lancet, and later withdrawn as fraudulent.29 Perhaps the most potent factor in the first two decades of the twenty-­ first century, however, was the rise of social media as an alternative source 29  “Wakefield’s article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent”, BMJ 2011; 342:c7452, at https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c7452 accessed 5 March 2020.

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of news, and platform for debate. Nothing in the algorithms that prioritised one item over another on these platforms was capable of assessing an item’s truthfulness. Nor did their designers care, so long as the item attracted “likes” and “eyeballs”. Indeed the entire social media enterprise was based on an extreme form of libertarianism in which content was prioritised by a self-referential system based on the number of clicks or shares it elicited in what was claimed to be an editorial environment free of human prejudice. This resulted in a situation in which outrageousness, weirdness or extremity of viewpoint—all of which generated widespread “liking” and sharing—received exposure simply by virtue of the fact that they exhibited those characteristics, regardless of whether they were true or had any grounding in fact. Popularity became the only organising principle.30 Montaigne said: If, like the truth, falsehood had only one face, we should know better where we are, for we should then take the opposite of what a liar said to be the truth. But the opposite of a truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.31

He might have been writing in 2020, not 1580. For all the blessings social media brought humankind, it was this great curse—provision of a global platform for the dissemination of lies—that was among the most potent contributors to the crisis in which democracy found itself in the second decade of the twenty-first century. These developments placed an even heavier ethical burden of truth-­ telling on journalism. The reputations of news outlets had long served as a way for consumers to distinguish between truth and falsity. As Philip Napoli observed, this important heuristic was undermined as news consumption migrated online.32 Research by the Pew Research Center indicated that individuals who consumed news via social media were capable of identifying the originating source of a story only about half the time.

 Rosenfeld, op. cit., p. 150.  Montaigne, M. (1580) [1993] Essays, London, Penguin, p. 31. 32  Napoli, P. (2019) Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 99–100. 30 31

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Moreover, other research indicates that fake news is more likely to be shared than legitimate news stories.33 In 2016 it was revealed that Facebook employed human editors to determine the content of its Trending feed after former insiders went public with accusations that these human beings regularly suppressed conservative news stories. In the wake of these revelations, Facebook relied more heavily on its algorithms to choose which stories were to qualify as Trending. This led to an increase in the number of fake news stories that ended up in the Trending category.34 These baneful effects of technological change were turbo-charged by populism. Populist speech, as Rosenfeld so aptly put it, involved rejecting ostensibly objective expertise and all the institutions, values, norms, procedures and people that expertise goes with and instead valorising a combination of quotidian experience and the feelings, impulses, beliefs and intuitions of ordinary people.35 The power of emotion and sentiment to defeat reason, particularly in an atmosphere of distrust of institutions, was demonstrated dramatically by the French Revolution. Reason, enthroned for a century-and-a-half by what we call the Enlightenment, was swept aside in an avalanche of hatred and romantic hopefulness. However understandable these impulses were in an epoch of gross inequality, squalor and hardship for ordinary people, they did not bring about the hoped-for liberte, egalite and fraternite. Instead they produced bloodshed, chaos and the Napoleonic dictatorship. A more recent historical parallel can be found in the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s. The human catastrophe of World War One, followed by the economic destruction and consequent social hardships inflicted on the Axis powers by the Treaty of Versailles, provided fertile ground in which populist leaders arose in the form of Hitler’s Nazism and Mussolini’s Fascism. Then, as in the 2020s, populist speech focused on lies about the influence of foreigners, scapegoating on the basis of race, and an appeal to nostalgia for a past in which a triumphant nationalism made nations great.

33  Silverman, C. (2015) “Lies, Damn, Lies and Viral Content” Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 45, https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8Q81RHH, accessed 11 June 2020. 34  Napoli, op. cit., p. 65. 35  Rosenfeld, op. cit., p. 99.

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Populist speech confronts truth-seeking journalists with a serious ethical dilemma: how to reconcile their ethical obligation to impartiality with the ethical obligation to truth-telling? Impartiality requires that journalists present the principal relevant perspectives on issues, but what if one of the principal relevant perspectives is based on populist arguments grounded in belief, fantasy or intuition that contradict argument grounded in scientific evidence? It is not a question of whether to report on these arguments, but how. These questions are explored as part of the discussion of impartiality in Chap. 8. Present the truth truthfully. Journalistic truth is evidence-based, grounded in verified facts fairly presented, and always contingent. What is published is the best version of this amalgam available at the time of publication. It is open to change as the evidence changes. It requires verification prior to publication. It also requires journalists to take account of compositional meaning and utterer’s meaning, and to exhibit a rational correspondence between the statement made and the facts that statement is about. These ethical requirements are grounded in the duty-based ethics that underpin the social contract and the consequentialist ethics expressed in Utilitarianism.

CHAPTER 7

Free speech: Rights and Limitations

The world is living through a great digital communications paradox. Technology that enables all who have access to the internet and the skills of basic literacy to participate in public discourse has also become the means by which public discourse has become fragmented and debased. This democratisation of public discourse has also become a means by which democracy itself is undermined. The vision so passionately argued for in John Milton’s Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty—that truth would infallibly emerge from a free contest in ideas—lies now in ruins. Yet free speech must survive if democracy is to survive. So democratic societies are confronted with a great challenge: how, in the digital world, might the blessings of free speech be maximised while the curses of its excesses be minimised? One place to start thinking about this is to consider the fundamental arguments for free speech. Voltaire, who developed an enduring and highly influential philosophy concerning free speech, considered it to be a fundamental right. He acquired, and retains, an iconic status as the champion of free speech. However, was he a champion of unconditional free speech? The answer, from his own writings, is no. This fact has been obscured by the rhetorical power of a quotation attributed to him but which he never uttered: I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Muller, Journalism and the Future of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7_7

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It was a fabrication put into Voltaire’s mouth by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, whose biography of Voltaire first appeared in 1892. While it is widely considered to represent his general philosophy, it has been taken to mean that he held extremely libertarian views where free speech was concerned. His writings show this to be wrong. Voltaire recognised that free speech had limits, and believed these were essential both to the good of society and to successfully persuading people to a new opinion. As John Iverson has pointed out, Voltaire tailored his message, both in form and in content, to give himself the best chance of meeting this objective. He accepted that if he was to succeed in getting people to accept principles they found repugnant, he would have to moderate his discourse.1 He also foresaw the need for tolerance in speech: Fanaticism, which has so desolated the world, can only be softened by tolerance, and tolerance can only be induced through indifference.2

By indifference Voltaire meant neutral detachment, rather than the shoulder-shrugging sense the word carries today. As Iverson says, Voltaire seemed to consider freedom of expression less as an absolute individual liberty than as an intellectual power that ought to be exercised strategically. In other words, he would ask: What am I trying to achieve by this particular use of my right of free speech? In the twenty-first century, Eric Barendt identified four fundamental arguments for free speech that were both persuasive and comprehensive.3 The first was the argument from truth, exemplified by Milton and Mill. Areopagitica,4 Milton’s address to the English Parliament in 1644 against press licensing, stated: Give me to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties.

1  Iverson, J. (2018) “Voltaire, Tolerance, Indifference, and the Limits of Free Speech”, Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture, Vol 47, 2018, pp261–264. 2  Voltaire to comte d’Argental, 5 November 1764 [D12178]. 3   Barendt, E. (2007) [2016 e-book] Freedom of Speech (2nd ed), Oxford, Oxford University Press. 4  Milton, J. (1644) [1973] Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England, Rivers, I. (ed), Cambridge, Deighton, Bell & Company.

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[Licensing books] will be primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civil wisdom.

Milton also argued for the necessity of free speech to good government in the era preceding the rise of modern democracy: When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civic liberty attained that wise men look for.

At the same time, however, Milton was arguing the need for Parliament to recognise that the censorship of books was an invention of the Catholic Church for the purpose of suppressing Protestant ideas. How, then, could the Parliament of a reformed—that is, Protestant—England continue to use a mechanism designed to destroy Protestantism?5 Ironically, Milton’s commitment to the Protestant cause induced him to accept for a time the position of press licensor at a time of great internecine religious divisions as efforts were made to draw the Protestant Churches of England and Scotland into greater harmonisation. It has been speculated that he took it on in order to see that it was not done more diligently than was absolutely necessary; alternatively that he might be able to reform the system from within.6 However, it is also the case that he feared free speech might undermine the tenuous position of the minority faction in Parliament that he supported as necessary to his vision of a Protestant England. Isabel Rivers, in her introduction to the edition of Aeropagitica already referred to, summed up the position: Milton still believed in the necessity of choice, but his own experience had taught him that only a few would know how to choose. For the rest, the hand of authority was a just sentence.7

This elitist approach of the right of free speech permeated the writings of that other great voice to be raised in the free-speech argument from

 Ibid. pp xii–xiv.  Robertson, R. (2010) Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-century England: The Subtle Art of Division, Pennsylvania, Penn State Press. 7  Milton, J. op.cit. p xiv. 5 6

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truth, John Stuart Mill8. His argument from truth was captured in this celebrated passage: [T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.

Mill’s argument tended to focus on the suppression of opinion, but it is clear that he subsumed within the realm of opinion the facts on which the opinion was based. Thus the truth of an opinion relied on the facts underlying the opinion being true. In this vein, he stated that all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.9 Mistakes were rectified by discussion and experience. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yielded to fact and argument.10 By this process, established truths retained their life and vigour. Yet however true something might be, if it were not fully, freely and frequently discussed, it would become a dead dogma, not a living truth.11 The high-mindedness of Mill’s approach to free speech—its references to the Socratic dialectics and Platonic dialogues, its disquisitions on religious disputations—tells us he was arguing for a freedom of speech that assumed a level of intellectual accomplishment and rigour that was stratospherically higher than exists in the day-to-day world of twenty-first-­ century politics. But did that disqualify him from being relevant to contemporary arguments? It did not. The fundamental arguments from truth and good governance that he espoused provides indispensable guidance for those wrestling with the endemic, in some places even institutionalised, falsehoods that disfigure contemporary political debate. Mill himself saw how the free speech argument from truth was essential to finding practical accommodations to the large antagonisms of political life in his time: democracy versus aristocracy, co-operation versus competition, sociality versus individuality. The latter two were still contested issues in 2020.

 Mill, J. S. 1859 [1998], On Liberty, Gray, J. (ed), Oxford, Oxford University Press, p21.  Ibid. p22. 10  Ibid. p25. 11  Ibid. p40. 8 9

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Mill did not argue for absolute free speech, however. He drew the line at lying and at attacks on what he called the comparatively defenceless.12 He also drew the line at the stigmatising of people who held contrary opinions as bad or immoral. This he saw as a form of bullying, usually on the part of those safe in the knowledge that they held the majority opinion. This, he said, really did deter people from expressing contrary opinions and was against the interests of truth and justice.13 The most fundamental objection to Mill’s argument from truth is that it was based on the assumption that free speech would necessarily lead to the emergence of truth. In Mill’s high-minded conception, free discussion might frequently lead to an insight or a revelation that would persuade disputants that one set of facts was stronger than another, but empirical truth emerges in many ways other than by free speech: through scientific observation and experimentation, or through legal proceedings, for instance. In cases like these, the free speech concept has an important role to play in the unfettered dissemination of the truth but it does not create the truth. Milton and Mill have been challenged on the grounds that they are fundamentally elitist and serve to silence public utterances of a majority of individuals.14 On this reading, Millian and Miltonian concepts of free speech have limited application even to a public sphere as narrow as that conceived of by Habermas.15 The Habermasian concept was of a bourgeois public sphere in which large numbers of middle-class individuals participated in reasoned public discussion over matters of general public interest. By the standards of the twenty-first century’s digitally networked public sphere, the Habermasian concept looks—and is—out of touch with reality. What is not touched by digital technology, however, is the core Habermasian idea of a public sphere as a place of mediation between individuals and the state. In democracies, this place remains essential. Barendt’s second argument for free speech was that the exercising of free speech conduced to people’s personal fulfilment. This argument has a human rights ring to it. It pre-supposes a right to self-development and that the freedom to speak—and to hear other speech—is an essential  Ibid. p60.  Ibid. p61. 14  Barendt, op.cit. p9. 15  Habermas, J. (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge MA, MIT Press p27. 12 13

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ingredient in the enjoyment of that right. As a general proposition, it is difficult to argue with. People denied the right to speak and to hear the speech of others would be not only denied participation in political and social life, but would be robbed of the opportunity to contribute to public discussion and the growth in self-worth that such contributions can bring. Barendt contested this argument on the basis that if intellectual development was a right, so were education, access to cultural goods and to travel. He argued that these are material needs and might be better seen as part of the right to personal autonomy.16 However, the right to have one’s say and to hear what others say is surely more central to participation in everyday political and social life and to informed participation in the democratic electoral process than are education, cultural goods and travel. In the democratic context, free speech has a larger claim to be considered as a right than do these others because without it participation in debate becomes a nullity. Barendt’s third argument for free speech as essential to citizen participation in democracy stated that while to some extent freedom of speech rested on laws, rules, values and conventions, its roots were to be found in the philosophical theorising already outlined in the arguments from truth and self-fulfilment.17 It was not confined to political speech but to speech generally. Theoretically it went so far as to cover speech that might be detrimental to the public interest. However, democracies have protected their citizens from at least some of these harms by laws concerning, for example, hate speech or incitement to violence. In these jurisdictions, especially where free speech enjoys constitutional protection, such laws need to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the courts that they are adapted to a proper purpose and that, in achieving that purpose, they do not unnecessarily burden freedom of speech. The fourth of Barendt’s arguments was that free speech was grounded in suspicion of government. The suspicion is that governments—and other powerful institutions such as the Catholic Church—will always try to suppress information that is against their interests or beliefs. There is a long and dishonourable history telling us this is true. The Church’s various Inquisitions and its Index of Forbidden Books are just the most long-­ lived, far-reaching and among the most ruthless examples.

 Barendt, op.cit. pp13–16.  Ibid. pp18–20.

16 17

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By the twenty-first century, however, the threat came in more subtle forms that were difficult for citizens to even perceive, much less understand. Yet Mill had been prescient enough to anticipate this. In addition to his argument from truth, he also saw liberty of the press as a bulwark against a corrupt or tyrannical government. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century he was confident enough to state this as an irrefutable fact. Although recognising that the law of England still contained anti-­ press measures on the statute books, he saw little danger of this power actually being used except in times of “temporary panic”.18 “Temporary panic” certainly gripped Western democracies in the long aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. This impulse seized the voting public across the globe, enabling governments to pass laws that contained monstrous repudiations of the most basic civil rights. It was all done under the rubric of national security. For example, by 2020 the Australian Government had enacted an estimated 83 pieces of national security law. They provided, among many other assaults on civil liberties, for secret detentions without judicial review, flagrant abandonment of habeas corpus, and innumerable bans on freedom of the press, with jail sentences to back them up.19 In Australia the effect was to goad the generally complacent and conservative press into embarking on what turned out to be a somewhat intermittent and half-hearted campaign for press freedom, grounded largely in suspicion of government actions and motives. It was called the Right to Know campaign and set off a short-lived flurry of activity towards the end of 2019. There were blacked-out front pages, indignant speeches from the heads of the country’s main media organisations and two parliamentary inquiries. The last-named revealed in their public hearings the ruthless determination of public servants and security agents to see that not a single sub-clause of the oppressive regime they had conned successive governments into implementing would change. By the middle of 2020, all had gone quiet, dampened perhaps by the overwhelming distraction of the coronavirus pandemic. But the prosecutions of whistleblowers, the secret trials of alleged transgressors and police pursuit of journalists all went on as if the pandemic had never happened. When the  Mill, J. op.cit. p20.  Lidberg, J. & Muller, D. (eds) (2018) In the Name of Security: Secrecy, Surveillance and Journalism, London, Anthem Press. 18 19

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first of the parliamentary reports came out in August 2020, it contained no recommendations of real substance. Journalism remained criminalised if it involved publication of anything the Government wanted to keep secret, whether it concerned national security or anything else.20 The Dutch philosopher, Benedict Spinoza, had good reason to reflect deeply on the question of free speech. His parents had been chased out of Portugal, it is thought by the Inquisition, and he himself was excommunicated by the Synagogue in Holland for heterodox views. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published in 1670, he wrote of democracy as the form of government “most consonant with individual liberty”. Like Hobbes 20 years before, he saw it as necessary to a peaceful social order that individuals should surrender their “natural rights” to satisfy their appetites and desires in return for the protection of the state against the depredations of others. But they did not surrender all their rights: “No one transfers his natural right so absolutely that he had no further voice in affairs.”21 He developed this embryonic free-speech argument further: No man’s mind can possibly lie wholly at the disposition of another, for no one can transfer his natural right of free reason and judgment or be compelled to do so. For this reason, government which attempts to control minds is accounted tyrannical, and it is considered an abuse of sovereignty and a usurpation of the rights of subjects…. It follows that men thinking in contradictory and diverse fashions cannot, without disastrous results, be compelled to speak only according to the dictates of the supreme power…. Every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks.22

While Spinoza does not expressly mention the press, it seems clear from the tone of his writing that the freedom of speech he described may be exercised in a variety of ways, including by writing and publishing.23 20  Commonwealth of Australia (2020) Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security report, Inquiry into the impact of the exercise of law enforcement and intelligence powers on the freedom of the press, August 2020. ISBN: 978-1-76092-042-5. 21  Benedict de Spinoza, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, translated from the Latin, with an Introduction by R.H.M.  Elwes, Vol. 1 Chapter XVI Tractatus-Theologico-­ Politicus, Revised edition (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891) https://oll.libertyfund. org/titles/1710 accessed 31 May 2020. 22  Ibid. Vol 1 Chapter XX. 23  Haun, M. (1977) “Spinoza on Freedom of Thought and Speech”, Free Speech Yearbook, Vol 16, No 1, pp47–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/08997225.1977.10555960 accessed 31 May 2020.

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Like Mill, Spinoza did not argue for free speech as a right that was limitless and absolute: “Unlimited concession would be most baneful.” He drew the line at sedition or at the use of speech to overthrow legitimate authority. People might raise their voices against legitimate authority but not go so far as to overthrow it. Where this line is drawn varies with jurisdictions. The United States has perhaps the most liberal free-speech jurisprudence in the world, grounded in the Jeffersonian ideal as expressed by the First Amendment, but even there, freedom of speech is not absolute. A brief survey of free-speech cases from the US Supreme Court gives an idea of what speech is protected and what is not. Several landmark cases have upheld the right to political speech, which is given a high level of protection, as are educational and scientific speech. Americans are free to withhold speech, specifically by refusing to salute the flag,24 to use certain offensive words and phrases as part of political messages,25 and to burn the flag,26 as many did during protests against the Vietnam War. Among the most celebrated cases that placed limits on free speech is one that dates back to 191927 and concerned the principle of harm prevention, which remained a primary restraint on free speech at the time of writing. In a unanimous judgement written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the court established the principle that speech representing a “clear and present danger” to others was not protected. The point was illustrated by one of the judgement’s most quoted passages: The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. … The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.

The circumstances of the Schenck case provide a good example of how these criteria of proximity and degree might play out in practice. Schenck was secretary of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia. In accordance with party policy opposing conscription during World War One, he had arranged the printing and distribution of leaflets urging young men not to  West Virginia Board of Education v Barnette, 319 US 624 (1943)  Cohen v California, 403 US 15 (1971) 26  Texas v Johnson, 491 US 397 (1989) 27  Schenck v United States, 249 US 47 (1919) 24 25

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enlist and to disobey the conscription laws. While this looks like a straightforward case of pushing a political position, and therefore perhaps enjoying the high standard of protection afforded political speech, in time of war the degree of harm to the national interest was held by the court to meet the “clear and present danger” criterion enunciated by Justice Holmes. It is thus clear that from Milton and Spinoza in the seventeenth, Voltaire in the eighteenth, through Mill in the nineteenth and the US Supreme Court in the twentieth centuries, harm to others has consistently been regarded as a legitimate restraint on free speech. Importantly, though, an equally consistent thread running through the thinking on this question has been that prior restraint on speech is an abridgement of free-speech rights. In democratic systems, there are limited conditions under which prior restraint might be sought, but the courts in such systems are generally reluctant to impose the necessary injunction. The preferred approach is to allow the speech to be uttered and for the speaker to take the consequences. For the press under twenty-first century conditions this will commonly take the form of a civil action for defamation or a criminal action for contempt of court. Other classes of speech that in the past have brought the force of the law down on journalists, writers and publishers—obscenity, blasphemy and sedition—have in most mature democracies been either repealed, read down by the courts to the point where prosecutions are a waste of time, or allowed to remain on the statute books in silent retirement, only to surface periodically as objects of ridicule. There is never room for complacency, however. In the early twenty-first century there were reactionary political forces, notably fundamentalist religionists of various stripes, wishing to revivify blasphemy as a crime. Other attempts to restrain free speech were grounded in the concept of “offence”, and were pursued in a range of contexts, including racial discrimination and religious freedom. A landmark case in Australia concerned racial discrimination. It had its origins in two newspaper articles published in the Herald Sun, Melbourne, in 2009, written by a columnist, Andrew Bolt. The burden of the articles was that certain named individuals conveniently identified themselves as Aboriginal in order to benefit from various government-funded awards and positions reserved for Aboriginal people, when they could just as easily have identified as having non-Aboriginal ethnicity. One of the people named, Ms Pat Eatock, brought proceedings against Bolt and the publisher of the Herald Sun, the Herald and Weekly Times (HWT), alleging a breach of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination

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Act. This made it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate people because of their race, colour or ethnic origin. In order to protect justifiable freedom of expression, Section 18D of the Act provided a defence to conduct done reasonably and in good faith for particular specified purposes, including making fair comment in a newspaper. Ms Eatock brought the proceedings on her own behalf and on behalf of people like her who, as the judge stated in his judgement, “have fairer, rather than darker, skin and who by a combination of descent, self-­ identification and communal recognition are, and are recognised as, Aboriginal persons”. She won the case and Bolt and the newspaper were ordered to publish an extensive apology. The crucial findings that went against them were that Bolt got important facts wrong and that he couched his articles in sarcastic language that failed the test of good faith. The outcome unleashed a sustained campaign by the parent company of the HWT, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, to have Sections 18C and 18D repealed as unjustified abridgements of free speech. The Australian Government wavered in the face of the Murdoch onslaught but after an equally vigorous campaign by ethnic community representatives whose constituents represent a significant proportion of the voting population, left the law unchanged. A more nuanced debate about whether the four criteria—offence, insult, humiliation and intimidation—were all equally justified on free-speech grounds was lost in the heat of battle, so this important question remained unanswered. The question of religious freedom arose in 2019 when a high-profile Sydney footballer, Israel Folau, posted on Instagram the following statement, printed in large type and surrounded by a yellow-and-black striped border signifying danger: “Warning. Drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists, idolators. Hell awaits you. Repent! Only Jesus saves.”28 Folau was a preacher in a fundamentalist Christian church run by his father in the north-western suburbs of Sydney. He was also employed as a professional player by Rugby Australia. After a previous homophobic outburst on social media, he had been warned by his employer that were it to recur, his contract would be terminated. In April 2019, after the post quoted above, that is what happened. The same Murdoch organisation that employed Bolt and had campaigned so hard to have the Racial Discrimination Act’s protections repealed, now took up the cudgels on behalf of Folau, arguing his religious  https://www.instagram.com/p/BwEWt2uHcLI/?hl=en

28

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freedom had been violated when Rugby Australia sacked him. However, the matter was decided not as a freedom-of-religion case but as one concerning employment contract law, and was settled by the parties on that basis. In both these cases, Australia had avoided dealing with an awkward collision of free-speech rights with other rights. With no bill of rights and no overarching constitutional or legislative protection for the press, the country was ill-equipped for the task, and the political will to tackle it was conspicuously absent on all sides of politics. Offence springing from perceived insults against religious sensibilities also produced in the early twenty-first century a phenomenon that came to be known as the assassin’s veto: “if you publish this, I will kill you.” There were many examples, but one of the bloodiest and best-known arose in 2005 from the publication of 12 cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed. They appeared in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, as a statement of defiance against threats by Islamist-jihadis to retaliate violently against those who would insult, or even publish likenesses of, the prophet.29 As news of the cartoons spread across the world, riots and protests occurred in several countries, some descending into violence. More than 250 people were reported killed, and there were attacks on Danish and other European diplomatic missions, as well as on churches and Christians. In Denmark, Muslim organisations laid a complaint with the Danish police claiming that Jyllands-Posten had committed an offence under sections of the Danish Criminal Code concerning hate speech. The presiding public prosecutor ruled there was no criminal offence because Danish legal precedent was clear that journalists had editorial freedom regarding subjects of public interest. There was a similar result in France, where the satirical weekly newspaper, Charlie Hebdo was acquitted of charges that it incited hatred. The incident marked the beginning of a number of violent incidents related to the cartoons at the newspaper over several years. In November 2011, Charlie Hebdo was firebombed the day before its November issue was due out. The issue was called Charia Hebdo and satirically featured Mohammed as guest editor. The editor, Stephane Charbonnier was placed 29  Cliteur, P. (2019) “The Danish Cartoon Affair” In Theoterrorism v. Freedom of Speech: From Incident to Precedent (pp.  97–122). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctvd1c77t.8

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on a hit list by the Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda, along with Kurt Westergaard, who had drawn one of the Danish cartoons. Then on 7 January 2015, two masked gunmen opened fire on Charlie Hebdo staff as vengeance for its continued caricatures of Mohammed. Twelve people were killed, including Charbonnier, and 11 others were wounded. While many newspapers across the Western world then re-­ printed the original Danish cartoons as a gesture of solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo staff, Jyllands-Posten did not do so, citing security concerns. The Danish newspaper was not the only one feeling intimidated by the assassin’s veto. In 2009, Yale University Press published a book by a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Jytte Klausen, called The Cartoons That Shook the World. Missing from it were the cartoons. In their concern about possible violent repercussions, Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counter-terrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: the book should not include the cartoons. Professor Klausen reluctantly accepted the decision but expressed concern at another decision by Yale not to publish other representations of Muhammed, all of which, she said, were widely available. Decisions made in response to the assassin’s veto are relatively rare but come with extremely high stakes. It presents the most acute dilemmas imaginable: Is my commitment to free speech worth risking my life for? Am I entitled to risk the lives of others in adhering to my commitment? In making its decisions—about both the cartoons and other depictions of the Prophet Mohammed—Yale University and its press canvassed a wide range of people whose credentials were relevant. Their advice was unanimous: do not publish. They took it. We can see there were three critical steps in the process. Step one was to recognise the existence of a risk. There had been no specific threat, so their risk assessment was based on observation of what had previously happened when the cartoons had been published. This told them that the risk of life-threatening violence was reasonably foreseeable, even though the extent of the risk, or how it might materialise, was unknowable. Step two was to ask those with credible expertise in diplomacy, Islam and counter-­ terrorism to advise on the level of risk. From the fact that the unanimous advice was to not publish, we may assume that the risk level was considered to be high. Step three was to confront the dilemma already described. It may be taken that a university of Yale’s stature, and its existence in a country where freedom of speech and of the press is accorded very high

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constitutional protection, would have a strong commitment to free speech and a free press. Against that has to be weighed several factors. The university has a staff and student body numbered in the thousands. All may become targets, on the campus or in the neighbourhood. Access to these areas is easy. This and the large number of potential targets makes the opportunity for a terrorist attack large and unpredictable. The size of the opportunity, the unpredictability involved and the impossibility of securing the safety of staff and students clearly persuaded the university’s authorities that taking this reasonably foreseeable risk was an unacceptable price to pay for adherence to the free-speech principle. Whether one agrees with the decision or not, the Yale case presented a stark example of the assassin’s veto at work, and of the way in which an institution with direct responsibility for the safety of many people went about making a decision whether to confront the veto or not. Fortunately, as matters stand, decisions where the stakes are as high as that do not confront professional journalists very often. However, at an everyday level, journalists in senior positions of editorial responsibility must make numberless decisions where the stakes vary from the most basic questions of news value through to questions about whether to inflict serious damage on a person, an organisation or a government. Editors, news editors, chief sub-editors, producers and executive producers make many choices like this. It is a function known as “gatekeeping”, and in the hoped-for liberated age in which social media would democratise the dissemination of news, enthusiasts for the new informational regime hoped the gatekeepers’ power would be much diminished and the world made a better place as a result. In 1950, an academic study was made of the work of an eponymous “Mr Gates”, a wire services editor at a Midwestern small-city newspaper in the United States. He determined what national and international news went into his paper. “Mr Gates” co-operated with the researcher by keeping all the wire copy from a single week. Ninety per cent of the stories that came across his desk went into the waste basket, and at the end of each night’s work “Mr Gates” retrieved them and wrote on each one his reasons for rejecting it. An analysis of these reasons showed that “Mr Gates’s” individual preferences and prejudices often appeared to be the determining factor.30 Here, in the early days of the Cold War, we see him rejecting 30  White, D. (1950) “The Gate Keeper: A case study in the selection of news”, Journalism Quarterly 27 (1950) 383–390.

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an article because “he’s too Red”—whether this refers to the reporter or the person being reported on is not clear. Another article is rejected because “Mr Gates” “didn’t care for suicides”. On others he wrote “B.S.” or “propaganda”. It turned out he also had a bias against the Catholic Church and certain government policies, and would not run particular stories as a result. In answers to the researcher’s questions, it became clear that he was conscious of some of these biases but nonetheless stated that, broadly speaking, his decisions were based on a desire for variety, a liking for human-interest stories, and a preference for stories that were “well-­ wrapped up” or “were slanted to conform to our editorial policies”. It is obvious that some of what “Mr Gates” did was censorship because of what we know about his motives. He was biased against the Catholic Church and against something called the Townsend Plan, an American pension scheme to help the impoverished elderly, so he would not run stories about them. Personal bias is an improper motive for not publishing news stories: it is censorship. On the other hand, he would not run stories about suicide because he did not like them. That is an insufficient reason in itself but let us assume for the sake of argument that it was based on an unarticulated view that they are distressing and invasive of privacy, so the publishing of them needed some particular justification. Concern to not unnecessarily distress people, and to not unjustifiably invade people’s privacy or grief, are proper motives for not publishing: it is not censorship; it is editing. It is a question of motive. One comes away from “Mr Gates’s” engagingly frank self-assessment with the feeling that to the extent he was representative of traditional media gatekeepers, social media did indeed do the public a service by draining off some of their power. How representative he was is, of course, unknowable. But after a decade-and-a-half in which the consequences of a lack of social media gatekeepers became evident, it was difficult to conclude that society was in fact better off without them. In the context of media ethics, the term “gatekeeping” has undergone a subtle but important semantic shift. It still conveys the sense of someone with the power to decide what will and what will not be published and, as the case of “Mr Gates” shows, that power can be abused. However, the new meaning adds another element. It says that “gatekeeping” is about editors telling readers what matters to them. There is no doubt that gatekeeping can be interpreted in this way, and it is just as bad as the censorship practised in some instances by “Mr Gates”. But these two negative aspects of gatekeeping do not tell the whole story of what this function

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does. It has positive aspects too: filtering out lies, hate speech, disinformation and misinformation; making assessments about the relative prominence to be accorded stories based on established news values, a concept discussed in greater detail in Chap. 8. This is called editing. In an age where the public discourse is awash with content that is unreliable and harmful, good-faith gatekeeping is indispensable to the maintenance of a well-informed and civil public discourse, and is a means by which ethical news outlets take responsibility for what they publish or broadcast. By contrast, there has been reluctance on the part of social media platforms to take responsibility for what they disseminate. It took until May 2020 for Twitter to finally draw the line at the lies that had been routinely spread on its platform by President Donald Trump since his inauguration three-and-a-half years beforehand. Twitter took the most basic of steps: it fact-checked a statement by Trump that mail-in voting (called postal voting elsewhere) was “substantially fraudulent”. Twitter assessed this statement as clearly designed to undermine public confidence in the American electoral system and flagged it as “potentially misleading”. It did not take it down but marked it with a label, alerting users to “get the facts about mail-in ballots”. When users clicked on an associated link, it took them to articles and tweets from journalists and experts debunking Trump’s claims. The Twitter page also carried a statement that “experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud”. Trump declared that Twitter was “now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and went on to tweet that “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH (his capitals), and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” These claims too were completely false. It is not an abridgement of free speech to correct lies, and the President of the United States did not have the power to prevent people publishing the truth about his lying. Ultimately, after Trump’s incitement of the Washington insurrection of 6 January 2021, Twitter shut down his account, and other social media platforms followed suit. By 2020, the argument of those such as John Stuart Mill and Justice Holmes that truth would emerge from a contest of ideas has been undermined by the digital revolution. It had led to diminished resources for journalism, diminished likelihood of exposure to news and opinions not already “liked” by the audience member; diminished gatekeeping barriers for fake news; increased targeting ability for fake news providers; enhanced speed at which fake news could travel, and diminished ability to distinguish

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fake from verified news.31 Research indicated that consumers of partisan news not only were more likely to consume fake news, but might also be inherently more resistant to counterspeech that might correct it.32 This phenomenon is explored more deeply in Chap. 10 on the effects of social media. Another paradox concerning free speech presented by social media is that while providing a platform for the broadest imaginable range of voices, it has also provided the means by which voices can be silenced. It is a phenomenon that has come to be called “cancel culture”, the Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year in 2019. The Macquarie defined it as “the attitudes within a community which call for, or bring about, the withdrawal of support from a public figure, such as cancellation of an acting role … ” Social media provides the engine that drives “cancel culture” by enabling large numbers of people to add their voices to the call, creating pressure on institutions and individuals that has led to cancellations of lectures and the dismissal of employees. It has become a means by which the otherwise powerless can exert influence over people or events that otherwise would have been beyond their reach in pursuit of remediation of a perceived slight or act of discrimination. However, its effect on free speech became an issue of concern among those who saw it as an illiberal silencing of academics, writers, journalists and artists on the basis of moral objections to things they said or wrote. In October 2020, Harper’s magazine published a letter of protest against it signed by 152 authors, academics, journalists, artists, poets, playwrights and critics.33 While applauding protests for racial and social justice, they raised their voices against what they described as a new set of moral attitudes that tended to weaken established norms of open debate and tolerance of differences in favour of ideological conformity. The choice between justice and freedom, which “cancel culture” implied, was a false choice: one could not exist without the other. Without endorsing “cancel culture”, an Australian writer and academic, Waleed Ali, argued that it was simply a matter of those without power using the tools of public discourse that the political right had been using 31  Napoli, P. (2019), Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age, New York, Columbia University Press, p90. 32  Kelly Garrett, R. et  al “Driving a wedge between evidence and beliefs: How online ideological news exposure promotes political misperceptions”, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Vol 21, no 5 (2016) pp331–348. 33  Letters section, Harper’s October 2020 issue.

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for decades to belittle the defenceless through “sensationalism, dog-­ whistling, tabloid media bullying campaigns and constant search for enemies, and the willing participation of politicians”.34 “Cancel culture” presents some acute dilemmas for journalists. In the US particularly, in the midst of the racial unrest caused by a series of police killings of African-American men, and the law-and-order response by President Trump and other Republicans, journalists on papers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post began taking public positions against the way their newspapers covered race issues. In the case of the Times, it led to the resignation of the paper’s editorial page editor, James Bennet, over the publication of an article by a Republican senator calling for a military response to the unrest.35 More generally, however, it is not necessary for journalists to submit to the illiberal impulses inherent in “cancel culture” but to observe the long-standing requirements in their ethical codes to be respectful of people’s personal attributes, to not refer to these unless they are relevant, and to portray people fairly. Of course, this is no guarantee that the “cancel culturists” will not come after them but it lessens the risk and undercuts the credibility of such attacks. It is simply one more way in which journalists must adjust to living with the ubiquitous influences of social media. Two strong philosophical traditions co-exist in journalistic ethics concerning free speech. One has its roots in the duty to truth-telling found in John Locke’s contribution to social contract theory. His ideal of the sovereign people cannot be realised unless the people have access to reliable information and honest debate. This duty-oriented or deontological ethic is reinforced by the unswerving commitment to the right of free speech advocated by Voltaire, but Voltaire also creates a bridge to the consequentialist ethic of the utilitarians, especially Mill. Mill advocates free speech as necessary to the general welfare but places limits on it, based on the harm principle. Voltaire places limits on it too because of what he sees as the destructive effects of fanaticism. There has been a tendency in recent decades for a libertarian approach, deriving largely from an imperfect

34  Ali, W. (2020), “Woke Politics and Power: How Liberalism’s Blind Spot Let Cancel Culture Bloom”, The Monthly, November 2020 issue, Melbourne, Schwartz Media. 35  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/james-bennet-resigns-­ nytimes-op-ed.html accessed 2 November 2020.

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understanding of Voltaire’s philosophy, to predominate over consequentialism. A further ethical dimension concerning free speech may be found in Isaiah Berlin’s concept of positive and negative freedom. It can be applied specifically to free-speech considerations, as the Australian legal scholar Andrew Kenyon has shown.36 Noting that free speech is commonly thought of in negative terms—freedom from constraint by censors, government or other sources—Kenyon argues that there are also obligations to act in support of free speech. The positive approach did not displace the negative: the two existed side-by-side. Although he was writing in the context of legal rights, his approach can readily be applied to an ethical context. The question then arises: what obligations arise if positive freedom of speech is to be advanced? He identifies three principal obligations: to make access to media open, to promote pluralism in media and to adopt a dual-focused approach to civic discourse. One focus, he argues, is a deontological individual-oriented focus and the other a consequentialist-­ public-­oriented focus. To make these ideas concrete, let us imagine how they might apply to an issue that was of high global political salience in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century: the issue of racism. Its salience as a political issue grew from two main roots: the vast exodus of refugees from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement ignited by revulsion at systematic police violence against African-Americans in the United States. Taking Kenyon’s obligations one by one, the first is to make access to the media open. It might be said that social media provided a ready-made fulfilment of this obligation, but that would be wrong. Social media is a Babel in which authoritativeness is indistinguishable from nonsense. If this obligation is to have real meaning, it falls to the professional mass media to fulfil it. Of course the professional mass media have opened their platforms to comment streams which is a form of openness, but that is not sufficient, the comments carrying no more authority than the exchanges that abound on social media. Fulfilling this obligation requires the media to widen the range of voices and perspectives they present, because then their journalistic and brand authority does make the ideal of media access 36  Kenyon, A. (2020) “Complicating Freedom: Investigating Positive Free Speech” in Kenyon, A. & Scott, A., Positive Free Speech: Rationales, Methods and Implications, Oxford, Hart Publishing.

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real. It places those voices and perspectives on the same plane as other voices and perspectives. Therefore, in the case study under discussion, the voices and perspectives of refugees, of those who care and advocate for them, of those in the political system who would welcome them, not just the voices of those who—often in more newsworthy language—would shun them, are voices that the media are obliged to include. The same applies to those who speak for African-American people victimised by police, with an additional dimension. Given the events across the United States in particular after the killing of George Floyd, the additional dimension is the need to distinguish between those who protest and those who loot. Conflating the two, or failing to distinguish between them adds to prejudice, the opposite of the concept of positive free speech. Kenyon’s second obligation—to media pluralism—calls for the media to act in ways that promote the ideal of pluralism as set out in Chap. 4: treating diverse cultures with respect; accepting that today’s audiences are likely to be far more culturally diverse than in the past; recognising that in multicultural societies excluding, misrepresenting or inciting antagonism towards cultural groups can be particularly divisive; adhering to higher values such as repugnance towards violence, wanton cruelty and oppression of persons. Kenyon’s third obligation calls for recognition of personal autonomy and the right of free speech as one means of exercising that autonomy, while at the same time being alive to the consequences for the public welfare when that right is exercised. The case of the Danish cartoons is a powerful illustration of what this obligation can entail. As the facts of that case show, Kenyon’s argument that the introduction of a positive approach to free speech complicates matters has a good deal of force. The bloody events that followed the publication of the Danish cartoons presented journalists everywhere with the dilemma of what to do in the face of the assassin’s veto. Is there a circumstance in which assertion of the right to free speech is worth a human life, in particular where the life lost might not be that of the speaker? At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, there was no clear answer. However, the insight from Voltaire provides an excellent touchstone for journalists. It is one thing to defend the right of free speech and quite another to defend particular uses of that right. Voltaire’s own record suggests he would neither have indulged in hate speech himself nor

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defended the content of hate speech by others, while at the same time defending their right to speak. He was prepared to be beaten up and to go to prison as a consequence of expressing opinions himself that offended French noblemen, but would he have been prepared to place the lives and safety of other people at risk for the same principle? We cannot be sure, but given Voltaire’s humanist philosophy, it does not seem very likely.

CHAPTER 8

Impartiality: Attainable and Assessable

The ancient Greeks wrestled with the problem of impartiality, or objectivity as others prefer to call it, and the conscientious journalist of the early twenty-first century wrestles with it too. This is not surprising, given the tortuous history of the concept: the sceptical—not to say cynical—critics of journalism who assert it simply serves the economic or political interests of some power source, and the despairing arguments of those who say it is an unattainable ideal. At the outset, it seems in order to provide an explanation for preferring “impartiality” over “objectivity” in the context of journalism. The particular suitability of “impartiality” lies in its meaning, its etymology and in the way its structure and appearance make its meaning plainly visible: not partial, not favouring one party over another. This meaning comes very close to the practical ethical requirement of journalists engaged in news reportage. For “party” other entities such as “idea” or “proposal” or “candidate” or “organisation” can be readily substituted. “Objectivity” is in some ways a more complex concept. It is used to denote detachment or the view of something from a disinterested spectator. The word is used in legal settings to mean how someone other than the person directly concerned in a matter might see it. Of course the meanings of these two words are similar, but in this chapter “impartiality” will be used to describe that non-partisan neutrality of news presentation that is expected in reportage. A further advantage is that impartiality in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Muller, Journalism and the Future of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7_8

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journalism, as it is conceived of here, has identifiable constituent elements that are amenable to assessment, as will be demonstrated. Whatever it is called, this ideal is a cornerstone of journalism ethics. Stephen Ward, as associate professor of journalism ethics at British Columbia University, used it as a vehicle for carrying his account of the whole development of journalism ethics,1 although in the interests of impartiality it should be pointed out that he preferred “objectivity”. There was a thread of argument which is of the first importance running all through his book: the imperfectability of our state of knowledge at any one time about much of the subject matter journalists report on. It follows from this that were we to aim at perfect impartiality, we are doomed to fail. Ward proposed instead a concept he called “pragmatic objectivity”, grounded in a fallibilistic theory of truth.2 Truths are fallible. What looks right today can be wrong tomorrow. Acceptance of this contingent quality of truth is essential for journalists. If they wait for the last word on something, they will wait forever. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1915, was still just a theory in 2020, although looking astoundingly good. On the other hand, if journalists cling to a truth that has been shown to be wrong or incomplete, they are guilty of misleading their audience and spreading misinformation. The evolution of our notion of what counts for truth in journalism occurred alongside wider intellectual developments. A reasonable starting point for tracing this history is the Enlightenment, reasonable because twenty-first century intellectual endeavours, including journalism, are still heirs to its fundamental precepts. By the time of Milton’s address to Parliament in 1644 arguing for the removal of press licensing (see Chap. 7), England had for a long time been the scene of a somewhat inchoate proto-press. It consisted of pamphlets or “newsbooks”—compact, brief, often single-issue publications—and broadsides—large single sheets printed on one side and designed to be displayed as proclamations in public places. Many pamphleteers were people with a cause to push, so their content tended to be fiercely polemical. That is not to say they were cranks. Far from it. They included Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, and Tom Paine, one of the great champions of American independence. 1  Ward, S. (2008) The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond (2nd ed), Montreal, McGill-Queens University Press. 2  Ibid., p. 268.

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But impartiality was not their aim. Their aim was to persuade, to advocate, to push for religious freedom or social or political reform. Towards the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, however, other fields, notably science and the law, began to rely on a new basis for deciding truth: evidence. In science, this was achieved by measurement, experiment and observation, the results frequently expressed in the language of mathematics. In law, evidence was accumulated from statements of witnesses or from the collection of items alleged to be connected with the commission of a crime. The imperfectability of truth was not allowed to stand in the way. In science, findings were required to be supported by details about method and to be replicable. In law, standards of proof—beyond reasonable doubt in criminal matters, on the balance of probabilities in civil matters—were established so that where evidence met the required standard, a case would succeed and where it did not the case would fail. Thus, specific scientific and legal proceedings could be brought to a conclusion without excluding the possibility that further relevant information might exist and might or might not come to light. This empirical approach to fact-seeking was a departure from philosophical speculations about causes and systems which, through metaphysics, had a long and distinguished lineage. When allied to religious dogma and faith, however, metaphysics had held back the advancement of knowledge. This was seen in the anti-scientific impulses of the Inquisition. The Enlightenment spirit detached the search for knowledge about the world from this faith-derived anchorage, replacing it with requirements for specific hypotheses, transparent methods of inquiry and the setting out of findings in prosaic prose shorn of rhetorical or polemical flourishes. The Royal Society, founded in 1660 under a charter issued by Charles II, was established with this end in view. Charles stated his purpose in these words: We look with favour upon all forms of learning, but with particular grace We encourage philosophical studies, especially those which by actual experiments attempt either to shape out a new philosophy or to perfect the old.3

3  https://royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/about-us/history/2012-­ Supplemental-­Charter.pdf accessed 6 June 2020.

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“Philosophic studies” was the term used to describe the breadth of disciplines later to be known as science. The Society required of its contributors that: In all Reports to be brought into the Society, the Matter of Fact shall be barely stated, without Prefaces, Apologies, or Rhetorical Flourishes.4

Excellent guidance for the journalist striving for impartiality in news reporting. In late seventeenth-century England, the ideals of the early Enlightenment developed alongside the constitutional monarchy that was still the form of democratic government in England well into the twenty-­ first century. The press was part of this constitutional development. The more liberal political climate that followed the English Revolution of 1688 and the effective end of press licensing in 1695 led to an explosion in news publications akin to the outburst of blogging that followed the creation of social media at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It was notable, however, that the excesses of these publications incurred the displeasure of the new monarchs, William III and Mary, and that the Bill of Rights of 1689 made no provision for freedom of the press. Nonetheless, the late seventeenth century was when the business of reporting as it was still understood four centuries later, was born. Reporters went looking for news, cultivating contacts, obtaining “leaks” and other forms of intelligence, and chasing after disasters and emergencies. While much of the reporting was breathless and highly coloured, Ward argued that the appeal to ethical and idealistic norms, of which impartiality was a central tenet, had taken hold on journalistic aspirations.5 A paradigm example of adherence to these ethical norms was the London Gazette, recognised for its reliability, comprehensiveness and absence of polemical content. The downside was that the Gazette was a government publication, so while it had the jump on the rest of the press with government announcements, it was not independent and was prey to being used by the Government to spread disinformation and propaganda. Its importance for present purposes, however, is that it demonstrated that there was a demand for accurate, timely and impartial news to serve a public sphere that was 4  Sprat, T. (1667) [1959] History of the Royal Society, Cope, J. & Jones, H. (eds), London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. 5  Ward, op. cit., p. 124.

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emerging alongside mercantilism and democratic growth. Money could be made by meeting that demand. By the middle of the nineteenth century, impartiality as an ethical value in journalism had become well-established. It was given perhaps its most ringing endorsement by C. P. Scott, first the editor and then the editor-­ owner of the Manchester Guardian. In his utterly convincing essay published in the newspaper to mark its centenary in 1921, he wrote: A newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free, but facts are sacred.6

Facts, accurate as to content and context, represent the first element of impartiality. A report that gets the facts wrong or distorts or suppresses them has no foundation on which an impartial account can be built. To adopt Scott’s word, it is tainted from the start. Beyond factual accuracy, impartiality has five more elements: fairness, balance, open-mindedness, disinterestedness and fidelity to news values. Each of these will be addressed shortly. Meanwhile journalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century became disfigured by the effects of rapid industrialisation of the press, circulation wars and associated sensationalism that made Scott’s timeless pronouncements look pallid and outdated. It gave rise to that phenomenon which came to be called “yellow journalism”, referred to in Chap. 1. J.  Herbert Altschull dates the beginning of mass media and the associated cheapening of news to 1833, with the launch of The New York Sun, which was aimed at a mass audience and priced to suit: what became known as the “penny press”.7 Yellow journalism was its linear descendant. Further excesses by the industry followed. After the horrors of World War One, there was an explosion of popular ebullience known as the “roaring twenties”. In this climate, newspapers contributed their own unrestrained mix of screaming headlines, intrusive photographs and salacious stories. 6  https://www.theguardian.com/sustainability/cp-scott-centenary-essay accessed 6 June 2020. 7  Altschull, J. H. (1995) Agents of Power: Media and Public Policy, 2nd ed., White Plains, Longman, pp. 21–30.

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Added to this was an increased concentration of newspaper ownership in fewer and fewer hands. Large chains of newspapers emerged, owned by such men as Hearst and J. S. Knight, where economies of scale allowed them to reach huge and diverse audiences under centralised commercial and editorial control, with consequent concentrations of economic and political power. Similar patterns were occurring in Canada, Britain and Australia. In Australia at this time, concentration of power took the form of cartels controlling the manufacture of newsprint and the supply of cable news. Australia’s distance from the rest of the world meant that these two commodities were very expensive items in newspaper budgets, so the established proprietors formed cartels that gave them control over, and an income stream from, the supply of these essential goods and services.8 All these developments created disquiet, particularly among politicians, as they saw the power of these media groups grow. In Canada, Britain and later Australia there were commissions of inquiry into the effects of media ownership concentration on those societies, but little came of any of them. In America, among the more sober reaches of the media industry, there was also concern over the apparent loss of public confidence in the print media. In the early 1940s, an extremely influential figure in the US media, Henry Luce, put up $US200,000 to support an independent inquiry into the press. He owned Time magazine, which was both authoritative and influential because of its adherence to high ethical standards. The resultant Commission on the Freedom of the Press, also known as the Hutchins Commission after its chairman, produced in 1947 a report titled A Free and Responsible Press, published by the University of Chicago Press. At the same time, the Commission’s intellectual leader, William Ernest Hocking, published a distillation of its most important discussions in Freedom of the Press: A Framework of Principle, also through the University of Chicago Press. As described in Chap. 11, it provided the foundation for the social responsibility theory of the press. It was in this somewhat chastened atmosphere that the press of the middle twentieth century set for itself the goal of impartiality in news reporting. Comment would be separated from news, consistent with the dictum of C.  P. Scott, and the news itself would consist only of factual accounts of events, utterances and causes. The perspectives reported 8  Young, S. (2019) Paper Emperors: The Rise of Australia’s Newspaper Empires, Sydney, New South Press, pp. 453–493.

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would be those of the people in the news, not of the reporter or the proprietor. It was a noble aim but it bred a sterile form of reporting, more akin to stenography than journalism. It was bereft of explanation. It left the audience to work out for themselves the significance of the matters reported and to join the dots: to make the connections between them and the wider social, political and economic context in which they occurred. It led to a reaction. In the early 1970s, there was a revival of what was called “the new journalism”, a narrative form which had flourished most conspicuously in the work of Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood was held up as an example of how reporting should be done. Unfortunately, for all its story-telling brilliance it was not always clear where the factual ended and the fictional or speculative began. The bible for this movement was an anthology of “new journalism” edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson.9 On serious newspapers, not only was this too radical a departure from the doctrine of strict impartiality but it was objected to on the ethical ground that readers would not be able to tell fact from fiction. To newspapers committed to publishing the best available version of the truth in a style that kept the reporter’s and the paper’s views out of it, this was a fatal flaw. Instead, what evolved was a style of reporting that was more analytical than the strict recitation of facts had allowed for. The facts had to be reported dispassionately as before, but connections could be made to other relevant facts that had occurred outside the event or statement being reported on. For example, if a politician made a speech contradicting something he or she had previously said, the contradiction would be pointed out as a matter of fact. Moreover, the significance of an event or statement could be pointed out, along with a reference to possible consequences. Thus, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, news reports frequently pointed out occasions where citizens’ or politicians’ behaviour violated the advice of medical experts. This was particularly noticeable in coverage of the mass protests held across America and the Western world in June 2020 after the policeman in Minneapolis killed George Floyd. Although still in the grip of the pandemic, and still under strong medical advice to wear face masks and maintain a minimum of 1.5 metres between people, societies in many countries saw mass demonstrations in which neither of these precautions were adhered to. On their own authority, the reporters pointed this out. Under 9

 Wolfe, T. & Johnson, E. W. (1973) The New Journalism, New York, Harper & Row.

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the procedures of strict impartiality, they would have been required to obtain a comment to this effect from some medical authority rather than say it themselves. By 2020, this more contextualised style of reporting had become the norm. The line between reportage and commentary had never achieved what William Blake called “the hard and wiry line of rectitude”, but it was clear enough for audiences to discern where it lay. It now shifted. Impartiality had developed to allow for explanation, for connections to be made, for significance to be pointed out, so long as the facts on which these rested were also contained within the same report and that the connections had been made in a way that was rationally supportable as impartial. Now, for the most part, the line was drawn at the point of avoiding value judgements. Of course, value judgements could be conveyed through choice of language or rhetorical syntax, not just by bald statements of preference, but in media where impartiality was required, lapses of this kind tended to be corrected by gatekeepers. Not all parts of the media adhered to this discipline, however. The code of practice for News Corporation newspapers in Australia allowed for news reports to be written in such a way as to convey to readers the newspaper’s stance on an issue.10 However, at the serious end of the media market, this was an exception. A more representative position was set out in the code of ethics of The Sydney Morning Herald: Herald staff will report and interpret honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts. They will not suppress or distort relevant facts. They will do their utmost to offer the right of reply, and they will separate comment from news.11

Impartiality is a quality whose presence can be tested for. In 2008, a system for doing so was developed for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.12 The first step was to analyse the concept of impartiality and isolate its constituent elements. There were considered to be six of these:

10  News Corp Australia Editorial Professional Conduct Policy para 1.3 https://www. theaustralian.com.au/editorial-code-of-conduct accessed 7 June 2020. 11  The Sydney Morning Herald Code of Ethics, https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/ transcripts/0726_smh.pdf accessed 7 June 2020. 12  Muller, D. (2009) unpublished consultancy report for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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accuracy, fairness, balance, open-mindedness, disinterestedness and fidelity to news values. Each of these was defined: Accuracy refers to the factual correctness of news and current affairs content and to contextual fidelity. Contextual fidelity means that the facts are presented in a way that gives a correct account of all the relevant facts and how they relate to one another. Fairness means presenting subjects of stories in a way that deals with the people and subject-matter proportionately, civilly, honestly, comprehensively, without conscious exploitation or stereotypical labelling, and so far as possible in accordance with the principles of natural justice. Balance means following the weight of evidence. It does not mean giving equal time, space or prominence to every perspective on an issue. Subject to this, the principal relevant perspectives of a story should be presented so that over time a rounded picture of these perspectives emerges. Openmindedness means bringing an open mind to the research and writing of a story putting aside personal preconceptions and preferences about what the story should be. Disinterestedness means no conflict of interest. In the context of editorial impartiality, conflict occurs when a journalist has a material interest in the subject-matter on which he or she is reporting. “Material interest” may be of a financial or non-financial nature. Conflict of interest also occurs when a journalist becomes a participant in a story. News values are those qualities that justify the selection or non-selection of material as news. They are the primary basis for proper editorial decision-­ making and affect choices about deployment of editorial resources, subject-­ matter to be covered, and the researching, presentation and prominence of a story. They have been exhaustively defined in the literature.13

For experimental purposes, a straightforward bi-polar issue was chosen. At the time, the Port of Melbourne Authority was proposing to deepen the shipping channels in Port Phillip Bay to allow for the passage of larger container ships. There were stated to be important economic benefits from this both for the port and for the Victorian state economy generally. Against the proposal stood a number of environmental groups who argued that the channel-deepening would destroy the habitat of marine life and damage the ecology of the bay. It was a heated public controversy that lasted many months. 13  See, for example, Harcup, T. and O’Neill, D. (2017) “What is News? News Values Revisited (Again)”, in Journalism Studies, Vol. 18, No. 12, pp. 1470–1488.

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A content analysis was carried out of ABC television news coverage and of the coverage by Melbourne’s two main daily newspapers, the tabloid Herald Sun and The Age, a broadsheet. Semi-structured interviews were also carried out with a range of protagonists from both sides of the controversy. Analysing these data by reference to the six elements, it was found that the coverage by the ABC and the Herald Sun had met the test of impartiality but The Age’s had not. It found that The Age’s news coverage had been biased against the channel-deepening. By coincidence, the same week that the report was delivered to the ABC, the editorial staff at The Age held a stop-work meeting to protest against the paper’s anti-­deepening news coverage. This provided at least a degree of empirical support for the efficacy of the test for impartiality developed for the ABC. In commercial broadcasting too codes were developed requiring impartiality in news reporting. Section 5 of the Ofcom code for British radio and television requires that the news be presented with what it calls “due impartiality”.14 The explanation for this term reveals that it incorporates the elements of fairness and balance as defined above. Stephen Ward’s concept of “pragmatic objectivity” provides a realistic approach to achieving impartiality in journalism.15 He begins by reaching back to the Sophists’ “imperfectionist” view of objectivity grounded in empiricism, as opposed to the “perfectionist” approach of the Platonists, who argued that knowledge must be absolute truth reached through dialectical reasoning.16 He regards the imperfectionist approach as built in to the reciprocating mechanism by which journalism both feeds into, and feeds on, what is happening and what is being debated in the public sphere. It is implicit in his approach that events unfold, and people speak, without recourse to dialectical reasoning. It is on this basis that Ward proceeds to develop what he calls “a rhetorical theory of social truth”. It says that what passes for truth in society is what emerges from an informal, interest-laden public discourse on topics that elude certainty.17 This is a kind of truth for which Platonic rules of strict logic and rigorous standards of expression are maladapted

14  The Ofcom Broadcasting Code (2009) para 5.1 https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/ assets/pdf_file/0027/19287/bcode09.pdf accessed 7 June 2020. 15  Ward, op. cit., pp. 288–308. 16  Ibid., p. 47. 17  Ibid., p. 290.

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because it is not the way the world works. Quoting Bruce McComiskey,18 Ward argues that societies base politics and laws on “communal truths-as-­ probabilities rather than universal truth”. Journalists navigate this contested world of plausibilities, counter-­ claims and uncertainties, trying to find the likeliest version of the available truth. It is how they do this that defines whether they are doing so impartially or not. Ward contends that their goal should be to help make rhetorical debate on public issues as “rational, inclusive and objective” as possible.19 His use of “objective” here is taken to mean “detached, disinterested” and, as such, an essential ingredient in impartiality. In this way, he says, journalism should assist the slow emergence of a more complete truth. How does this fit in with the evolution of impartiality from something bounded by fact to something that might include explanation, evaluation and interpretation, as happened from the late 1970s onwards? As we have seen, it is neither possible nor desirable—if we are to have a journalism that helps people make sense of the world—to bleed news reporting entirely of value statements. The selection of every word of a news story, except for “a” and “the”, represents a value judgement. The task is to distinguish between a personal value judgement—one that inheres in a journalist’s worldview and is hence subjective—and a value judgement that derives from the observable reported facts. This can be classified as an objective value judgement, one that derives from factors external to the journalist. And, yes, as a semantical aside, supports the use of the term “objectivity”. The same can be said for evaluations and judgements made in other fields, notably science, the law and academic research. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, societies that were at least half-well-governed did not disparage epidemiologists’ opinions about the likely trajectory of the illness’s transmission, because the opinions were based on expertise and credible modelling. They proved to be right, but that was not obvious at the time governments had to decide on economic lockdowns and restrictions of people’s movements in order to contain the contagion. Only conspiracy theorists and incompetent administrations dismissed these opinions

18  McComiskey, B. (2002) Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press. 19  Ward, op. cit., p. 291.

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as subjective and therefore either politically motivated or unworthy of being taken seriously. In the polarised political atmosphere of 2020 America, a new discussion about impartiality broke out. Reporters on some of the country’s most serious and respected media outlets—The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Bloombergs—began to argue for a moral dimension to be included in any assessment of the quality of news reportage. For example, was coverage of racial issues done in a way that combatted racism and discrimination? In a highly partisan digital world, was impartiality selling the public short by providing “a view from nowhere”? The dean of journalism at Columbia University described objectivity as an “inherited shibboleth”, to which the Columbia Journalism Review posed the question: What comes after we get rid of objectivity in journalism?20 It was a good question and led to a lively debate about the longstanding weaknesses of objectivity: a mindless neutrality, an unhelpful procession of he-said-she-said statements that left the audience no better able to draw a useful conclusion about the rights and wrongs of an issue. But to these valid criticisms, some answers may be offered. First, the question of moral clarity: whose moral preferences are to prevail? Allowing that racism is always wrong, is it the function of a news report about race to also be a vehicle for combatting racism or discrimination? Or is it rather to report the issue in such a way as to at least not add to the racism and to convey—by the portrayal of the protagonists, by the voices used, by the language, framing and tone—that racism is wrong? When Trump proposed a moral equivalence between the white supremacists and the anti-­ racism protesters in Charlottesville, reports pointing out that equivalence and the political equivocation it represented did not violate the elements of impartiality. Adding a test of moral clarity to impartiality would open the way for greater criticism of journalism as a means of imposing a particular morality on audiences. Secondly, is it really selling the public short to refrain from joining in the chorus of polarising voices, when there is a deficit of impartial voices? This seems to be giving way to the pressures of the moment, making matters worse, not better. Thirdly, impartiality/objectivity is indeed an “inherited shibboleth” and there is a reason why: it is one of the ingredients in the provision of a bedrock of reliable information on public affairs that 20  https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/what-comes-after-we-get-rid-of-objectivity-in-­ journalism.php. accessed 31 October 2020.

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citizens need in order to participate in political, economic and social life. It ought not be used as a term of scorn. However, it has always been a contested concept. Herbert Altschull, echoing in some respects the critique of Noam Chomsky, considered objectivity to be one of the means by which the press exerted social control in the interests of those in political and economic power. He argued that the journalist’s code of objectivity, as he called it, helped the powerful maintain civil order and fix limits on departures from ideological orthodoxy. “So long as ‘both sides’ are presented, neither side is glorified over the other and the status quo remains unchallenged.”21 Whatever truth there may be in this proposition, it does not amount to a case for journalists to give up on impartiality and its constituent elements. The alternative is to leave the field vacant for the further polarisation of news, the consequences of which were drastically illustrated in the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and in particular during the presidency of Donald Trump.

 Altschull, op.cit. p. 63.

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PART III

Press Development and Theory

CHAPTER 9

Development of Professional Mass Media

For present purposes, the professional mass media is defined as newspapers, magazines, radio and television in their analogue and digital forms. It does not include social media. Social media is a different entity. It interacts with the professional mass media but its history, structures, functions and cultural norms are so different from those of the professional mass media that it merits its own place, and that is found in Chap. 10. The roots of professional mass media in its English-language lineage can be traced back to Tudor England. And so can its uneasy relationship with government power. Historians have made familiar the importance of the press as an instrument of royal policy under Henry VIII, but almost from the first it was also a vehicle for opposition.1 A statute of 1484 gave complete freedom to the press in England, a situation to which it has never returned. It is true that in 1494 Henry VII had found it necessary to issue a proclamation against fake news—what he called “false tidings and tales”—but the liberal regime of a free press otherwise remained undisturbed. However, by the 1530s, Henry VIII was fighting a war of politics and theology on two fronts: against the Pope over his divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and against the Lutheran Protestants of Europe over biblical 1  Loades, D.  M. (1964) “The Press under the Early Tudors: A Study in Censorship”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol. 4, no. 1, 1964, pp. 29–50. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41337104 accessed 13 May 2020.

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interpretations. Wars have always provided the pretext for censorship and so it was in sixteenth-century England. In 1521 there had been a public condemnation and burning of Luther’s books in London, the first recorded act of overt censorship in England. Nine years later, Henry was finding it necessary to take a more systematic approach, declaring any act or written word against himself or his marriage to Anne Boleyn to be high treason. In 1538, a further proclamation banned the importation of books written in English and required that any new book published in England be submitted to the Privy Council, the king’s principal advisers, for approval. Thus began a system of press licensing that was to last in its fullest form until it began to lapse after the English Revolution of 1688. Even so, a vigorous and often highly polemical newspaper tradition took hold in the form of pamphlets and what were called broadsides. After the deaths of Henry and his only son Edward, his daughter Mary ascended the throne, and the vigour of the opposition press intensified. She upped the ante by giving the Court of Star Chamber the power to punish writers, editors and publishers for breaches of the licensing system. Its methods mirrored those of the Inquisition which, as part of its functions, was doing a similar job for the Pope.2 The development of the traditional mass media as the twenty-first century understands it occurred alongside the emergence of modern democracy. The two were intertwined and symbiotic, but the beginnings were unpromising. The licensing system in England fell into temporary desuetude after Parliament abolished the Star Chamber in 1641, but this resulted in what seemed to the politicians—not to mention Charles I—an unseemly explosion of irreverence and dissent. So pre-publication censorship was restored by the Licensing Order of 1643. This provoked the poet John Milton to write Areopagitica, his address to Parliament in 1644 arguing for the abolition of press licensing. The title was a reference to the Areopagitic Discourse of the Greek orator Isocrates, in which a contemporary problem is placed in the context of history. It reflected the spirit of the Enlightenment, which assumed human beings were creatures of reason and that consequently they were capable of distilling truth out of the contestation of ideas. In Areopagitica, Milton captured this idea in a single sentence: 2  Murphy, C. (2012) God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World, London, Allen Lane.

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Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.

He made many other arguments against censorship, including the pragmatic one that no matter how many censors there were, it was ultimately futile to attempt to suppress the ideas that formed inside people’s minds, and that eventually they would find a way out. Parliament was unmoved, and it was to be another 45 years before the licensing system was allowed once more to lapse. The English Revolution of 1688 represented the triumph of Parliament over the monarchy, an historical shift in power from the Crown to elected representatives, although the franchise was extremely narrow, being largely property-­ based. The property qualification was gradually watered down by successive Reform Acts during the nineteenth century, but it was not until 1918 that all men aged 21 and over got the vote, the right being also extended to women aged 30 and over. In 1695, the licensing system was effectively ended with the refusal by the House of Commons to renew the enabling legislation. It was a recognition of how necessary a free press was to an enfranchised population. This decision by the Commons resulted in a burst of political publishing and pamphleteering, producing publications that would still be recognised as newspapers in the twenty-first century. The first daily newspaper, The Daily Courant, appeared in 1702. In 1785, exactly 90 years after the effective ending of press licensing, John Walter started The Universal Daily Register, which soon afterwards became The Times of London. In 1795, the celebrated Conservative politician, Edmund Burke, stood up in the House of Commons and stated that the gallery where the newspaper reporters sat had become a fourth estate of the realm. This was the first recorded specific recognition of the institutional position the press had come to occupy in the nascent democratic constitutional arrangements of England. Burke, in referring to the press as the fourth estate of the realm, was placing the press on the same institutional footing as the other three estates: the Lord Spiritual—being the bishops of the Anglican Church; the Lords Temporal—being the aristocracy, and the Commons. Democracies still use that term today, a recognition of the institutional position of the press alongside Parliament, the executive government and the judiciary. The expectation was that this fourth estate would be a watchdog over the other three.

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Across the Atlantic, the newly independent American colonies had already drafted their new constitution and placed such a high price on a free press as essential to the functioning of democracy that in 1791 they enshrined its protection in their Bill of Rights. To any journalist whose political habits and understandings were formed under the Westminster system—or as Australians like to call theirs, the Washminster system—the bold and unambiguous commitment to press freedom by the founding fathers of the United States is a source of both inspiration and despair. Inspiration because it eloquently expresses the highest ideals of journalism’s place in democratic life; despair because it shows up in stark relief how circumscribed is the relative position of the press in countries like Britain and Australia. Look at these words, not just from Jefferson—perhaps the best-­ recognised among the founding fathers for his advocacy of a free press— but from Hamilton and Adams too: The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free … all is safe. (Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, 6 January 1816.) The liberty of the press consists, in my idea, in publishing the truth, from good motives and for justifiable ends, though it reflect on the government, on magistrates, or individuals. If it be not allowed, it excludes the privilege of canvassing men, and our rulers. (Alexander Hamilton in People v Croswell, 13 February 1804.) The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state. (John Adams, in the Free-Press Clause, Massachusetts Constitution 1780.)3

Thus the First Amendment to the US Constitution contained in the US Bill of Rights states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or

3   All these quotations from https://ammo.com/articles/first-amendment-quotes-­ founding-fathers-freedom-of-speech-freedom-of-press accessed 13 May 2020.

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of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It reflected the founding fathers’ acceptance of John Locke’s concept of “the sovereign people”, and their recognition of the fact the people could not be sovereign without the information necessary to make choices about who their government representatives should be, and to make the myriad choices open to people in a free society about political, economic and social life. It can be deduced from the histories of England and the United States that a free press was brought into their constitutional arrangements in diametrically opposite ways. In England it was fought for from the ground up over two centuries by writers and publishers, in the teeth of opposition from monarchy and Parliament alike. In the United States, it was imposed from the top down in the lapidary words of the Constitution. Australia, the third democracy that occupies a place in this book, followed the English pattern. The first newspaper in the founding colony of New South Wales, was the official government gazette, carrying government notices but little that could be called journalism, and certainly nothing that criticised government actions or personnel. However, a vigorous newspaper industry swiftly developed among settlers in what was to become Sydney, although only one of those mastheads was to survive infancy, The Sydney Herald that was later to become The Sydney Morning Herald. It was still being published in the third decade of the twenty-first century and was the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia. For much of its existence it was deeply conservative, even reactionary. Its relationship with democracy was for a long time antagonistic. Aping developments in England, it supported a property franchise for elections in New South Wales, and abominated the idea of one vote one value. It dismissed democracy as mobocracy, excoriating it as the triumph of an ignorant mass over a knowledgeable and cultivated elite. In the aftermath of the Eureka rebellion of 1854, in which gold-diggers in Victoria rebelled against an unfair taxation system, only to be brutally put down by that colony’s militia, the Herald coined a new term of execration: digocracy.4

4  Souter, G. (1981) Company of Heralds: A Century and a Half of Australian Publishing by John Fairfax Ltd and its Predecessors 1831–1981, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press.

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However, the struggle in England to throw off press licensing had left sufficient of an imprint on the political DNA of the white settlers, overwhelmingly from the British Isles, who created the Australian democracy that there was never a question of licensing newspapers. The history of broadcasting was entirely different. In twentieth-century democracies no other media industry was so systematically and profoundly shaped by the state as were radio and television broadcasting. Three justifications were advanced by governments for the regulation of broadcasting, one technical, one ideological, and one socio-political. The technical justification was that the electromagnetic spectrum within which radio signals could be transmitted and received needed to be rationed and allocated so that broadcasters kept clear of one another’s signals, and enough space was retained for defence and emergency services. The ideological justification was expressed in an assertion that the spectrum was a public resource and, as such, properly subject to accountability through public authority. Moreover, it was seen as inimical to this public interest in the spectrum that it should be appropriated permanently to private ownership, at least without some form of governmental supervision. The socio-political justification was that radio broadcasting was the most powerful medium of mass communication the world had ever seen. It could reach those who could not read, who could not get a newspaper or were not inclined to read one. Its immediacy trumped newspapers as the source of breaking news. Its content was effortless to absorb by comparison with the task of reading a newspaper, and there was something compelling, even magical, about the live and instant nature of its transmissions. This assessment of the power of radio broadcasting was accepted by politicians everywhere as an article of faith. They feared its possibilities as an instrument of public manipulation, but they also saw in it an instrument of public instruction, of cultural enrichment and, in Australia, of overcoming the tyranny of distance. These functions were set out in charters by which public-sector broadcasting was established. As a result of these different antecedents for different media, the traditions concerning government control were also different. The assumptions about the importance to democracy of a free press—a term now including radio and television—remained intact. Yet in most countries, including democratic countries, broadcast news and current affairs were at various times subject to some form of government regulation, commonly through the licensing system by which the broadcasting spectrum was allocated. News and current affairs content was not excluded from the

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licensing system, and so an anomaly was created: news content published in newspapers was not subject to licensing but on radio, and later on television, it was. While it was long considered wrong in principle that in any democracy any news service should be subject to government licensing, that remained the position in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and much of western Europe, as well as in most other parts of the world, for many decades. There is also a further historical anomaly: state ownership of broadcasters. Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all had publicsector broadcasters that survived in their various forms into the twentyfirst century. These were financed by a licence fee charged to the public (British Broadcasting Corporation), by direct government grant (Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Radio New Zealand), or by a combination of government grant and advertising (Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service; New Zealand’s television service; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). The charters under which they operated generally guaranteed operational independence from government, although in Britain and Australia in particular governments repeatedly attempted to exert pressure, exact revenge or satisfy ideological cravings to rein in their activities by cutting or threatening to cut their funding. It was illustrative of this unceasing ideological warfare that a history of the BBC should be called Pinkoes and Traitors.5 The title drew on a reference to the BBC put into the mouth of Denis Thatcher, husband to the then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, by the satirical newspaper Private Eye. For years, the Eye ran what it called “Dear Bill” letters. These purported to be correspondence between Denis Thatcher and Bill Deedes, then editor of the deeply conservative Daily Telegraph in London. In this particular letter Denis is recounting to Bill how he was advising Margaret about the future of the BBC: “I keep telling the Boss if ever there was a state-owned industry ripe for privatisation, it is that nest of pinkoes and traitors at Shepherd’s Bush” [the location of the BBC]. Denis was reportedly delighted by the satire, and it was seized on by Jean Seaton as the title for her history of the BBC.6 A history of the ABC reveals a similar pattern

5  Seaton, J. (2015) Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation 1974–1987, London, Profile Books. 6  Ibid., p. 20.

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of government vengefulness and attempted intimidation by the use of funding cuts.7 The United States adopted a completely different model for its public-­ sector broadcasting. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established by Congress as a non-profit organisation through which federal government funding was channelled to public-service broadcasters such as the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. However, these broadcasters raised large proportions of their funding from public subscriptions, philanthropy and donations. Agencies were established in all these countries to regulate radio and television broadcasting and to exert a degree of accountability over them by setting standards concerning taste and decency, protection of vulnerable audiences such as children, and depictions of violence, including in news and current affairs programmes. While broadcasters generally made an accommodation with these rules, in the United States these arrangements came under increasing pressure because of tensions they created with First Amendment doctrine. Relevantly for present purposes the Federal Communications Commission, which was the regulator, introduced what it called the Fairness Doctrine. This imposed two requirements on licensees: that they cover issues of importance to the communities they served, and that in doing so they gave a voice to contrasting viewpoints on these issues. However, the system was open to abuse. For example, the Nixon White House used the Fairness Doctrine to try to cower the broadcast media in its reporting of that spectacularly corrupt administration. This added to the First Amendment tensions. These factors, coupled with a political climate favouring deregulation, resulted in the Fairness Doctrine’s being abolished in 1985. It had also been argued in some quarters that the Doctrine had had a chilling effect on broadcasters.8 It is clear from this brief history that broadcast journalism has had a more complex relationship with governments in democratic countries than newspapers have, and the anomalous circumstance in which broadcast

7  Inglis, K. (1983) This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932–1983, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, pp. 389–406. 8  Hazlitt, T. & Sosa, D. (1997) “Chilling the Internet? Lessons from FCC Regulation of Radio Broadcasting”, 4 Mich. Telecomm. & Tech. L. Rev. 35 (1998). Available at: https:// repository.law.umich.edu/mttlr/vol4/iss1/2 accessed 16 May 2020.

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news and current affairs remains subject to government licensing is still not resolved three decades into the twenty-first century. A further unresolved issue for many Western democracies is how to impose effective accountability more generally on the news media without violating the principle of a free press. More headway has been made on this in Scandinavia than in other Western democracies in large part because the press and public alike were anxious not to allow the press to become a tool of tyranny as it had under the Nazis in World War Two. In Norway and Sweden this was achieved by the establishment of press councils that acquired legitimacy through the positive involvement of all stakeholders and a conscientious approach to resolving complaints with fairness and independence. In Denmark, the system was grounded in legislation and operated as a quasi-judicial tribunal. The commitment to these systems by the press itself indicated that in these societies the balance between freedom of the press and redress for wrongful harm done by the press was struck differently than in the Anglophone democracies. As we have seen, the value of press freedom was prioritised very highly in the US and the struggle to throw off the yoke of press licensing had left a legacy of deep resistance to abridgement of the press in Britain. These cultural influences flowed on to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, although alone among these countries Australia has done nothing to enshrine freedom of the press in law. The difficulties the issue of press accountability presented to Anglophone democracies came to a head in 2011, when newspapers in Britain owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, part of a global empire with dominant media interests in the US, the UK and Australia, were revealed to have systematically hacked the mobile telephones of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. In the process, the company had “blagged” officers of the London Metropolitan Police and other British Government agencies including British Telecom to release private information on citizens.9 The term “blagged” referred to the use of inducements to officials, including in some cases bribery. The hacking scandal revealed the best and the worst of journalism, and showed up Britain’s press accountability system for the elaborate sham that it was. The best came from Nick Davies, a reporter on The Guardian. In 2008 he began investigating the hacking of people’s phones by a 9  Davies, N. (2014) Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch, London, Chatto and Windus, p. 336.

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Sunday newspaper owned by News International called News of the World. One such story concerned the hacking of a phone belonging to Gordon Taylor, head of the Professional Footballers’ Association, by agents working for News of the World. With breathtaking cheek, the Murdoch organisation laid a complaint against The Guardian with the Press Complaints Commission, what passed for Britain’s newspaper accountability body. After a complaisant and incompetent investigation, the Commission upheld the complaint. The British national press, collectively known as Fleet Street, turned on The Guardian as a newspaper prepared to betray its brethren. However, Davies and The Guardian would not go away. Then in 2011 the News of the World committed a hacking atrocity that would lead to its own demise and reveal the way in which press power—specifically Murdoch’s power—had perverted the relationship between the country’s executive government and the press. The newspaper hacked the telephone of a 13-year-old schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, who had disappeared on her way home from school. During the period between her disappearance and the discovery of her body six months later, the News of the World repeatedly hacked her phone, leaving messages that suggested she was still alive and thereby raising false hopes in her stricken parents. The scandal that ensued forced admissions from senior politicians, including the leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, that they had been cowed by, and in thrall to, Murdoch. A Cabinet minister, Vince Cable, said: “It’s a little bit like the end of a dictatorship, when everybody suddenly discovers they were against the dictator.” The Prime Minister, David Cameron, was close to Murdoch and had hired an editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, as his communications adviser. Only in the climate of public fury created by the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone did Cameron finally denounce the newspaper’s behaviour. He then appointed a Law Lord, Brian Leveson, to conduct a public inquiry into press misconduct. Coulson, by the way, finished up in prison for conspiracy and bribery for his role in the newspaper’s hacking operations.10 Leveson produced his report in 2012. In it he exposed case after case in which the lives of ordinary people, as well as celebrities, had been blighted by the invasions of privacy and grief facilitated by the hacking of their phones. He recommended that the Press Complaints Commission—controlled by the Fleet Street editors but given a very English veneer of  Ibid., pp. 335–360.

10

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respectability by having a titled lady as its chair—be replaced by a selfregulator empowered to actually do the business. It would handle complaints, investigate persistent offending and run a new arbitration system to deal with defamation and breach of privacy. It would have the power to impose fines.11 Its independence from politicians would be ensured by its being subject to periodic inspections by what was called a “recognition body”. The whole scheme would be enshrined in law. It never happened. Fleet Street fought a rearguard action that ultimately saw the whole system of press accountability degenerate into a chaotic mess of competing bodies, none of them remotely close to matching Leveson’s scheme. The idea of legislated change evaporated in a Parliament still cowed by the power of the fourth estate, especially Murdoch. Thus the fourth estate, whose primary function was to be a watchdog over Parliament and the executive government, instead had become so powerful that it had neutered them both. It was a sobering reflection on the state of British democracy. In Australia, the Federal Government initiated its own contemporaneous inquiry into media accountability.12 It ran in parallel with the Leveson inquiry and in 2012 it produced a report recommending a statutory authority to hold the media to account. Another, more technologically focused, government inquiry recommended beefed-up self-regulation with the threat of a statutory authority being held in reserve as a goad.13 These provoked the same outcries as had Leveson and neither was adopted. In Australia, newspaper accountability remained in the hands of the Australian Press Council, an industry-dominated self-regulator whose primary funder is Murdoch’s News Corporation, funding being based on share of circulation. In the United States, state-based press councils on the self-regulatory model came and went. The last, the Washington News Council, folded in 2014 for want of funds, having been unable to find a replacement funder for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.14 Its experience was similar to those of the national press councils in Britain and Australia: any effort at exerting meaningful accountability thwarted by a hostile press arrogantly  Ibid., pp. 389–390.  Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation. 13  The Convergence Review. 14  Silverman, C. (2014) “Last press council in US will close next month”, The Poynter Institute, https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2014/last-press-council-in-u-s-will-­ close-­next-month/ accessed 17 May 2020. 11 12

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minimising co-operation and doing what it could to ignore or downplay adverse findings. The abuse of power by elements of the professional mass media over many decades led to a decline in public trust, particularly in newspapers. An analysis of public trust in Australian media as measured through public opinion polls over about 50 years, conducted for the Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation showed that with the exception of the national public-sector broadcaster, the ABC, there was no media in Australia that a majority of voters said they trusted. In the immediate aftermath of the phone-hacking scandal, a survey in Australia of readers’ trust in the newspapers they read showed that the Murdoch newspapers were the least trusted—even by those who read them.15 By then, Australians had been exposed to two generations of Murdoch press influence in the nation’s political life. Rupert’s father, Sir Keith Murdoch, had been managing director of Australia’s most powerful newspaper company, the Herald and Weekly Times group, and in the 1930s boasted about his power to make and unmake prime ministers. In 1931, he was deeply involved in an ultimately successful backroom campaign to have Joseph Lyons elevated to the Prime Ministership, instructing his editors to mount a powerful public campaign to boost Lyons’s position. In Canberra, Murdoch’s chief of bureau, Aloysius Alexander, boasted in his diary that ‘everyone is saying in Canberra that I have put Lyons in as Prime Minister. It is more than half true’.16 From the perspective of history, it was astonishing to observe how closely Rupert was to follow his father’s playbook in peddling influence among leaders of democratic countries and the extent to which he corrupted the democratic process. It was no wonder that Australian readers of the Murdoch press in 2011 were so untrusting of its newspapers. Against this background of public distrust, which existed across the Anglophone democracies, it was easy for people like Donald Trump to sell the public on the idea that the media published fake news. Yet he was the prime faker. At the time of writing, with the 2020 presidential election ahead in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was impossible to know whether this dishonesty had done him any electoral damage. Perhaps it had, or perhaps as Alistair Cooke foresaw all those years ago, the public 15  Finkelstein, R. & Ricketson, M. (2012) Report of the Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation, Annexure F, Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia, p. 380. 16  Young, S. (2019), Paper Emperors: The Rise f Austalia’s Newspaper Empires, Sydney, NewSouth Publishing, pp. 380–388.

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had become so cynical it no longer mattered to them whether politicians told the truth or not. The dishonesty seemed as contagious as Covid-19 itself. When Trump contracted the virus and was admitted to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington a month out from voting day in 2020, one of his attending doctors lied outright at a media conference about the president’s condition, giving the impression that it was less serious than in fact it was. The symbiotic development of democracy and the professional mass media has created a legacy in which each is indispensable to the other, and both are indispensable to voters. While in theory that should create a healthy tension conducive to transparency and the public good, in practice the lack of accountability of the professional mass media has created a distortion in democratic constitutional arrangements. Yet governments in the US, Britain and Australia show no appetite at all for remedying this situation. Donald Trump physically embraced Rupert Murdoch in the days when he had Murdoch’s unqualified endorsement, saying, “There is only one Rupert that we know of.” In Australia, a former Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, initiated a petition to Parliament in October 2020 calling for a royal commission into the influence of the Murdoch media on the Australian democracy. The petition attracted more than half a million signatures. One of the signatories was a former Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Both he and Rudd, when in office, had fallen foul of the Murdoch media largely over the issue of climate change, which the Murdoch media continued to deny. It was telling that neither the incumbent Liberal prime minister, Scott Morrison, nor the incumbent Labor leader of the opposition, Anthony Albanese, endorsed the royal commission proposal. This tells us it is one thing to antagonise Murdoch when out of office and quite another to do so when you are either in office or aspire to be.

CHAPTER 10

Development of Social Media

As social media attained global reach halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, romantic hopes were entertained for its beneficial effects on democracy. In particular it would democratise certain key functions of the press: be a more transparent and broad-based means of informing the public; provide a more inclusive forum for the discussion of ideas and exchange of opinion. The power of the professional gatekeepers in the established media would be swept away. In its place would be countless thousands, perhaps millions, of citizen journalists all committed to telling the public the truth about what was really going on. They would not be corrupted by “insider” status and proprietorial diktat. There was much to be said for these hopes. They were grounded in a thorough appreciation of the ways in which large sections of the established media had abused public trust over centuries: sensationalising and trivialising the news, colluding with governments in covering up information the public was entitled to know, allowing commercial interests to improperly influence news decisions, and presenting the news in ways that advanced sectional interests and the commercial fortunes of media companies. And all this while being unaccountable for the way they used their power. Alas within a short time—no more than a decade—many of these hopes had been dashed. The tyrants of yesteryear—the newspaper barons, the radio and television moguls—had been replaced by a new generation of tyrants, much wealthier, much more powerful, even more opaque in their © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Muller, Journalism and the Future of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7_10

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operations and with a global reach never before accomplished: the giant social media platforms of which Facebook and Google were the pre-­ eminent examples. They were accused, with good reason, of being a prime factor in the development of the contemporary crisis enveloping democracy. Disillusionment set in early. An analysis of political blogs during the 2004 US presidential election showed that while blogging mythology consisted of tales in which intrepid citizens scooped and fact-checked a corrupt mainstream media, found alternative sources and proposed actions in response to issues raised, in reality bloggers were activist media pundits, which raised questions about their true role in political communication.1 There was also an early warning to professional journalists about the perils of regurgitating blog content without first independently verifying it. On 8 September 2004, the American television network CBS ran a story casting doubt on President George W. Bush’s fulfilment of his military service obligations. It was based on what turned out to be a confected memorandum purportedly written by an officer who had been Bush’s supervisor during his period of service. In the fallout from this failure of verification, CBS’s long-time anchor, Dan Rather, apologised on air and separately announced his retirement. CBS dismissed four senior journalists from its news division.2 According to the British media scholar James Curran and his colleagues at Goldsmith University in London, who carried out a range of research projects on the effect of the internet, the initial hope-filled assessments of the internet’s potentialities had one enormous error at their centre. This was the failure to appreciate that the impact of technology is filtered through the structures and processes of society.3 They identified seven constraints imposed on the internet by these forces. First, in an unequal world, the disadvantaged were left out of the net’s communicative community. Second and third, the world was divided by language, and the hegemony of English allowed its users a large reach relative to others. Fourth, those with high levels of cultural capital—command of language, expertise, and flexible working arrangements—were more likely to be 1  Travers Scott, D. (2007) “Pundits in Muckrakers’ Clothing: Political Blogs and the 2004 US Presidential Election”, in Tremayne, M. (ed) Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media, New York, Routledge, p. 39. 2  Ibid., pp. 40–41. 3  Curran, J., Fenton, N. and Freedman, D. (2016) Misunderstanding the Internet, Taylor and Francis. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unimelb/ detail.action?docID=4391730 accessed 11 December 2020. p. 33.

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heard. Fifth, the internet was just as capable of spewing out hatred, foster misunderstanding and perpetuate animosities as “sweetness and light”. Sixth, nationalist cultures were strongly embedded in societies, nourished and supported by television, a medium organised primarily on a national basis. Seventh, authoritarian governments had developed ways of managing the net and of intimidating would-be critics.4 As for the hope that the internet would rejuvenate democracy by empowering the voiceless and generating higher levels of political engagement, their research in 11 countries across four continents had shown that, consistent with other surveys, more than a third of respondents continued to agree with the statement that no matter who a person votes for, it will make no difference to what happens. This level of cynical disengagement from politics long pre-dates the internet, but Curran et al’s point is the net has not had the hoped-for effect of reducing it. Similarly with the hope that the internet would democratise the news media. Despite Rupert Murdoch’s disingenuous claim that “power is moving away” from the likes of him and his organisation, the fact is that television remains the primary source of news, as shown by a series of authoritative research studies.5 Moreover, the established media companies were quick to colonise online news with their own news websites, giving them a leading position in online news, as research by Curran et al showed.6 Robert McChesney too, although enthusiastic about expanding the range and quality of media in order to better serve the Lockean ideal of a self-governing people, was under no illusions about the potentialities of the digital revolution. The belief that the internet would enable everyone to go out and “blog and do our thing” and put an end to corporate media interest struck him as impossible. Good journalism required resources, specialised skills and institutional support to stand up against powerful political, economic and social forces. He observed what has since become a commonplace: that the marriage of the internet to profit-seeking would do nothing to improve journalism and, if anything, would set it back.7  Ibid., pp. 8–11.  See, for example, Ofcom (2014) News Consumption in the UK: Report, London, Office of Communications. 6  Curran J, Coen S, Aalberg T, et al. “Internet revolution revisited: a comparative study of online news”, Media, Culture & Society. 2013;35(7):880–897. doi:https://doi. org/10.1177/0163443713499393. 7  McChesney, op. cit. p. 151. 4 5

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The technical possibility that each person could own a limited “mass media” with which to communicate occasionally to a large group (as with social media) could not be thought of as duplicating the roles and functions now generally attributed to the professional mass media. As the American media scholar C.  Edwin Baker argued, complete equality of actual communicative power was not only not possible but it was probably not appropriate even as a goal. The soundness of that opinion, written in 2006 as the social media explosion was just going off, is attested to by what we have seen to be some of its most deleterious consequences, including fake news and hate speech.8 It would of course be grossly misleading to create the impression that blogging or social media use is inherently and invariably bad. Quite the reverse is true. As with any technology, it can be put to good uses as well as ill. An example was the way social media initially provided an eye-­witness account of the killing of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020, and then ignited a worldwide protest against police and prison brutality towards people of colour. Within a few hours of this cold-blooded killing being posted on social media, thousands of protesters were on the streets of Minneapolis. This too was relayed on social media, and with extraordinary speed people in cities across America and then across the world erupted in indignation. By now, professional mass media had added their disseminative power to the social media footage and so the world saw a dramatic example of the combined effects of social media and professional mass media. Each contributed its own particular strengths. Social media was there to capture in real time far more of the action than any number of news crews could possibly cover. Professional mass media contributed its verification expertise, its brand authority and its extensive reach into the offline world, using the social media content as raw material and submitting it to professional journalistic procedures. Millions of viewers, listeners and readers around the world saw it through the prism of news outlets they trusted. This provided the basis on which they believed what they were seeing and hearing was true. In the so-called fake news era, these two arms of media, drawing on each other’s strengths, were able to inform the public with remarkable speed, accuracy and credibility. 8  Baker, C. Edwin (2006) Media Concentration and Democracy : Why Ownership Matters, Cambridge University Press, p10. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest. com/lib/unimelb/detail.action?docID=281758 accessed 11 December 2020.

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They also exerted accountability on police by recording and broadcasting their brutal crackdown on the protesters and on the professional news crews. There were many images, provided by social media, of police bashing, teargassing and pepper-spraying reporters and camera crews. As reporters ducked for cover and camera operators were pushed to the ground, social media’s countless eyes bore witness. It was an historically important moment that brought home what social media and professional mass media could do for democracy when they worked in symbiosis. They also exposed just how fragile American democracy had become. As the Washington Post stated in a headline over a report about police attacking journalists, “the norms have broken down”.9 The working relationship between social and professional mass media took some years to evolve. Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of The Guardian from 1995 to 2015, described the ways in which that newspaper attempted to integrate itself into the online world. For the professional mass media, this world consisted of two distinct parts: social media, which was virtually an open-slather global Babel, and the online platforms of the professional mass media. However, there was an important crossing point. Nothing the professional mass media did was immune from being critiqued on social media by anyone who chose to critique it. This was another aspect of social media’s democratising effect: new voices and a new form of accountability that the media had not previously been exposed to. Rusbridger’s descriptions of the confusion, false starts and successes involved in adjusting to this new world showed what a challenging task it was.10 As he told it, he had on the staff a kind of seer, Emily Bell, who would walk into his office and utter what he wryly called one of “Emily’s Mad Pronouncements”, overturning fundamental tenets of what the newspaper had been doing for decades. Reality, a year or two later, would show these announcements to be not only sane but prescient. Among other things, they resulted in the adoption of what Rusbridger called “mutualisation”, a process in which the public was not only invited to comment, but the paper opened its online columns to contributions from 9  https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/journalists-at-several-protestswere-­injured-arrested-by-police-while-trying-to-cover-the-story/2020/05/31/bfbc322a-­ a342-­11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html accessed 15 June 2020. 10  Rusbridger, A. (2018) Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, Edinburgh, Canongate.

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the public, subject to processes of moderation in particular concerning truthfulness and taste. Doubtless this struggle was being replicated all over the world, but The Guardian was to share an experience with The New York Times and Der Spiegel that set new boundaries around the extent to which online content would be permitted to influence what was published by reputable outlets of the professional mass media. On 25 July 2010, the three newspapers published selections of what became known as the Afghan War Logs. These were US classified documents obtained by the online publisher Wikileaks, founded by an Australian hacker, Julian Assange. The leak had come from an American intelligence official, Chelsea Manning. The War Logs revealed appalling behaviour by the US military, and attitudes by the US diplomatic corps inimical to the conducting of civilised diplomacy. The fact that such a vast cache—something like 390,000 documents concerning the Iraq war alone—had been leaked was embarrassing enough for the Americans, but the revelations they contained aroused revulsion in many quarters. The critical aspect of this for present purposes was the way in which Assange was treated by the newspaper editors. According to Rusbridger, Assange had wished to be considered as having shared editorial control with the editors over what was to be published. He was rebuffed. As Rusbridger put it: he was either editor or source. He couldn’t be both. The stories as published contained redactions to protect parties who faced risk of serious harm if their identities were to become known. Established news values were applied to the selection process. It was not a document dump. Professional journalistic standards of verification, harm-­ minimisation and public-interest considerations were applied. This enraged Assange. Wikileaks had made its reputation making raw dumps of material without regard for these standards of professional ethics. That was not what the editors of the three newspapers were going to countenance. Rusbridger wrote: “Much of the editing on which we prided ourselves was, to his eyes, unnecessary if not positively repressive.” It was an example of the positive effects of gatekeeping. If democracy was to come out of its crisis stronger than before, one important contribution the professional mass media needed to make was to become the means by which the public discourse was conducted civilly, respectfully and responsibly, and based on verified facts. Gatekeeping was essential to making this happen.

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For a time, however, it looked as if social media might indeed overtake professional mass media in public trust as an original source of news, but longitudinal data showed that this trend was to last only briefly. Beginning in 2001, the Edelman Trust Barometer conducted an annual study globally of people’s trust in non-government organisations, government, business and the media.11 From 2012 it began to track trust in traditional and professional online-only media as a source of general news and information, and compare it with trust in search engines and social media platforms. The trend data showed that social media’s high point of trust was reached in 2015, when for the one and only time to date it outranked the professional mass media, 54%–51%. By 2018 professional mass media’s trust levels were pulling away, leading social media 59%–51%. The 2019 Edelman report showed a gap of 20 percentage points between trust in traditional media and social media as a source of news. It also showed that 73% of people globally were worried about false information or fake news being used as a weapon. At the same time, the 2019 report showed what it called a massive 22-point rise in news engagement between 2018 and 2019. The degree of engagement was assessed on the basis of questions about how often people consumed news and whether they shared or posted news content online, either on social media or by other online means. Towards the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, a further concern about social media as a source of news began to be discussed extensively. This concern was centred on the capacity of social media platforms to tailor the news content to the tastes of the individual user, based on algorithmic calculations of their preferences as demonstrated by prior choices made by them on the platform. An obvious effect of this process was to offer the user only news content for which they had already shown a preference, to the exclusion of news content for which they had not already shown a preference. In 1995, a full decade before social media became a global phenomenon, this development had been prophesied by a communications technology specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nicholas Negroponte.12 Technology, he said, would enable the creation of what he called a “Daily Me”, in other words a newspaper tailored entirely to an 11  https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2019/02/2019_Edelman_ Trust_Barometer_Global_Report.pdf accessed 20 May 2020. 12  Negroponte, N. (1995) Being Digital, New York, Vintage Books.

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individual’s tastes. In 2006, this became a reality when Facebook introduced its News Feed. It enabled people to see what they wanted to see and disregard the rest. Google News similarly used algorithms to rank stories for breadth of interest, proximity of an event to an audience, freshness and user consensus of a source’s trustworthiness. The process by which algorithms tailored people’s individual news feed, drawing on unprecedented levels of personal data derived from people’s demonstrated preferences from their online activity, was described as the “rationalisation of audience understanding”.13 In 2013 Facebook adopted an algorithm that incorporated 100,000 factors into the process of curating users’ news feeds.14 The paradox here was that while it was true that individual choices supplied the algorithm with its raw material, what the algorithm produced from analysing the aggregate of those choices was not of the individual’s making. It was of the algorithm’s making. So far from empowering individual choice, it in fact diminished it. Cass Sunstein, in his powerful meta-­ analysis of the effects on democracy of social media,15 called it “an architecture of control” over people’s access to information. One of his central arguments was that what citizens in a democracy really needed was not an architecture of control but “an architecture of serendipity”. In other words, a system of accessing information that would allow them to stumble over something they had not indicated an interest in, or a point of view that might challenge their own. This brings us to the issue of what Eli Pariser called the “filter bubble”.16 In the years following his influential analysis of how the internet was radically changing democratic politics, new terms emerged for the same phenomenon. One of the most enduring was “echo chamber”, a powerful metaphor capturing the idea that people clustered in like-minded groups telling each other the same thing and so reinforcing their belief in its rightness and truth. The effects of this phenomenon were magnified by the 13  Napoli, M. (2019) Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age, New York, Columbia University Press, p. 12. 14  Ellsworth, M. (2013) “EdgeRank is Dead: Facebook’s news feed algorithm now has close to 100K weight factors”, Social Media Performance Group blog https://www. socialmediaperformancegroup.com/edgerank-is-dead-facebooks-news-feed-algorithmnow-has-­close-to-100k-weight-factors/ accessed 20 May 2020. 15  Sunstein, C. (2017) #republic, Princeton, Princeton University Press. 16  Pariser, E. (2012) The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalised Web is Changing What We Read and How We Think, New York, Penguin Random House.

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hashtag movement. Hashtags began to be used like electronic banners to identify which side of a cause or a controversy people could join. In 2015, #Never Trump was countered by #MakeAmericaGreatAgain. The contest between #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter was discussed in Chap. 5. Cass Sunstein identified three main explanations for group polarisation: the persuasiveness of arguments and information, reputational considerations, and confidence, extremism and corroboration.17 While it was rational to be persuaded by good arguments and information, the question was whether people in an echo chamber were actually getting good arguments or good information or merely reinforcement of their pre-existing preferences which had got them into the echo chamber in the first place. Reputational considerations rested on the plausible assumption that people wished to be perceived favourably by other members of their group. Confidence, extremism and corroboration responded to people’s uncertainty about how they really felt about an issue. So long as uncertainty lasted, they tended towards the middle ground, but as they became more confident, they tended to become more extreme, a tendency that was strengthened as others agreed with them, corroborating their position. Sunstein argued that this architecture of control had created information bubbles within which a person could live, promoting social and political polarisation and fragmentation.18 On attitudes to such issues as gun control (in the United States), immigration (in the United States, Britain and Australia) and climate change (everywhere in the West), debate became increasingly strident and extreme as like-minded people stirred each up into an ever-increasing frenzy of hostility towards the opposing viewpoint. On occasion, this hostility, with its associated crudity of language and rhetoric of violence, spilled out into the real world. A tragic example was the killing of the young woman in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 when she was run down by a car driven by one of the white supremacists against whom she was protesting. In these ways, the extremism brewed in the hothouse of social media echo chambers seeped out into wider public discourse, debasing the quality of debate, eroding established norms of public behaviour and amplifying differences in a way that made compromise on important matters of public policy difficult and sometimes impossible. It was a phenomenon  Sunstein, C. (2017) #republic, Princeton, Princeton University Press, pp. 71–75.  Ibid., p. 5.

17 18

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that caused alarm in those concerned about the contribution being made by social media to the developing crisis in democracy. In 2018, Siva Vaidhyanathan produced a book with the arresting title Anti-Social Media.19 At the outset he identified one of the fundamental problems with the global platforms: that of governance. This had several dimensions. The one most insidiously affecting the working of democracy was the recklessness with which Facebook in particular allowed its network to be used to subvert the democratic process. The most egregious example was Russia’s use of Facebook to corrupt the US presidential election campaign in 2016 with a relentless outpouring of targeted fake news designed to appeal to voters whose attitudinal predispositions the Facebook algorithm had already worked out. Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller was appointed by the US Justice Department to investigate allegations of Russian meddling in the election. His report, published in March 2019, stated that a Russian organisation called the Internet Research Agency (IRA) had conducted social media operations targeted at large US audiences “with the goal of sowing discord in the U.S. political system”: By the end of the 2016 US election, the IRA had the ability to reach millions of U.S. persons through their social media accounts. Multiple IRA-­ controlled Facebook groups and Instagram accounts had hundreds of thousands of US participants. IRA-controlled Twitter accounts separately had tens of thousands of followers, including multiple US political figures who retweeted IRA-created content. In November 2017, a Facebook representative testified that Facebook had identified 470 IRA-controlled Facebook accounts that collectively made 80,000 posts between January 2015 and August 2017. Facebook estimated the IRA reached as many as 126  million persons through its Facebook accounts. In January 2018, Twitter announced that it had identified 3,814 IRA-controlled Twitter accounts and notified approximately 1.4  million people Twitter believed may have been in contact with an IRA-controlled account.20

19   Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018) Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 20  Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I of II, Special Counsel Robert S.  Mueller, III, Washington, DC March 2019 pp. 14–15.

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The problem was made worse by the refusal of the platforms, especially Facebook, to accept that they were publishers and not just carriers. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has persisted in this fiction for years. As late as April 2018 he was insisting to Congress that Facebook was a technology company, not a publishing company, although he agreed Facebook was responsible for the content it circulated. He drew a distinction between being responsible for what Facebook distributed and being responsible for the original content. It was, to put it politely, a Jesuitical distinction. But it was an important one strategically for Facebook, since to admit to being a publisher would have been to admit taking on the legal responsibilities and liabilities associated with that position, something Zuckerberg was clearly anxious to avoid. In the United States, he appeared to be on solid ground, legally speaking. Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 stated that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as a publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The courts in Canada had also taken a liberal view of this question, expressing concern about a “chilling effect” that might descend on the internet should the global platforms be subject to the same liabilities as publishers.21 However, it was a distinction that was not accepted in the Australian courts. In April 2020, Justice Melinda Richards in the Supreme Court of Victoria held that according to the rule of strict liability for publication contained in Australian defamation law, Google was in fact a publisher. Google had mounted an argument that because its search engines were automated, it was not a publisher because it was not an intentional communicator of words or images. This was not the same line Zuckerberg had run in Congress but it fundamentally amounted to the same thing because it sought to deny responsibility for the content disseminated. Under the admittedly repressive Australian defamation laws as they stood in 2020, the concept of what constituted a publisher was construed very broadly. Applying the law as it stood, Justice Richards found that by publishing hyperlinks to defamatory material, Google was a secondary or subordinate publisher.22 Once notified of the existence of defamatory content, the secondary publisher became liable and was required to take it down in what 21  See, for example, Crookes v Newton [2011] 3 SCR 269 referred to in the judgement of Richards J in Defteros Google LLC [2020] VSC 219 30 April 2020. 22  Supra at paras 41, 54 and 55.

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the court called “a reasonable time”. Based on evidence from Google staff, Justice Richards found that “a reasonable time” was one week.23 This brief legal excursus illustrates that the distinction clung to by Zuckerberg and others in the social media industry was shaky at law and indefensible as a matter of ethics. It also sat oddly with the spirit of Zuckerberg’s manifesto for Facebook, published on the Facebook website on 16 February 2017.24 In it he was at pains to emphasise Facebook’s good intentions: to help the people of the world build supportive, safe, informed, civically engaged and inclusive communities. His reference to the 2016 US election blithely disregarded any question about facilitating foreign interference and was confined to a statement that “we helped more than 2 million people register to vote and then go vote”. No hint of awareness that Facebook might have helped misinform them about the issues on which they were about to cast their vote. Vaidhyanathan described this as information “pollution” and pointed out that it was not easy, especially on devices with small screens, for Facebook users to readily distinguish between something from YouTube and from a credible source such as The Washington Post, because Facebook had none of the cues that ordinarily allowed readers to identify and assess the source of a story. He also argued that much of Facebook’s content was couched in terms that struck what he called “strong emotional registers”,25 whether these were positive—joy, warm-heartedness, thankfulness, relief— or negative—anger, hatred, prejudice, vengefulness. Facebook, he said, was deliberately engineered this way, encouraging extremism and polarisation. In August 2020, The Economist published the results of an analysis it had done of the way Twitter’s algorithm prioritised content. It found that Twitter’s system appeared to reward inflammatory language and outlandish claims.26 These dystopian effects of social media led to a political backlash, particularly in the United States. In July 2020 the leaders of Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon were called before Congress to answer for their actions. The pressure had been growing for several years, and in 2019 Facebook and Twitter in particular had embarked on a programme  Supra at paras 58 and 64.  https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10 103508221158471/?pnref=story accessed 1 May 2020. 25  Vaidhyanathan op.cit. p. 5. 26  The Economist, 1 August 2020, “Graphic Detail: Twitter’s Algorithm”, p. 69. 23

24

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to reduce harmful content speech and respond constructively to requests to take down material that violated standards concerning copyright, regulated goods and services, national security, defamation and privacy. According to Facebook’s data, the platform’s removal of hate speech had risen tenfold over 2019–2020. In the second half of 2019, Twitter removed 2.9 million tweets, double the number removed in the previous year.27 It also began to place warning labels on some of Donald Trump’s more egregious tweeted lies. When in the dying days of his presidency Trump used Twitter to undermine public confidence in the integrity of the election and to call his supporters onto the streets, Twitter cancelled his account. In October 2020 Facebook also established an Oversight Board to scrutinise its moderation decisions. Its membership included the former editor-­in-­chief of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. These attempts to combat fake news and hate speech were as welcome as they were overdue. The filter-bubble or echo-chamber effect, which is primed by this kind of content, has a psychological dimension as well as damaging public discourse. Once a view on a controversial topic takes root in someone’s mind, it can be difficult, even counter-productive, to try to change it. This proposition has been proved experimentally. In 2005, a study was conducted into political misperceptions surrounding the issue of whether Saddam Hussein, the one-time dictator of Iraq, did or did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The assertion by the administration of George W. Bush that he did was the basis on which the United States and its allies, including Britain and Australia, went to war in Iraq. Subsequent inquiries proved conclusively that Saddam had not had weapons of mass destruction, and a heated controversy raged for years. The facts were consumed in the fire of ideological battle. In the study, the results of which were published in 2010,28 the participants were asked to read a mock news article containing a genuine quote from President Bush that there was “a real risk” that Saddam would pass on weapons of mass destruction to terrorists and that this was “a risk we could not afford to take”. The same mock news article then reported on the genuine contents of the Duelfer Report, which documented the

 The Economist 24 October 2020, “The Great Clean-up”, pp. 15–17.  Nyhan, B. & Reifler, J. (2010) “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions”, Journal of Political Behavior Vol 32, No 2, pp. 303–330. 27 28

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absence of a stockpile of WMD in the period immediately before the invasion of Iraq by the allied forces. After reading this article—which reported Bush’s claim about WMD and the factual finding that they had not existed—participants were asked whether they agreed or disagreed that Saddam had WMD but had been able to hide them. The results showed that people of conservative political persuasion persisted in their belief that Saddam had indeed possessed WMD despite the evidence in the Duelfer Report. Thus the corrective information had no effect on those predisposed by ideology to believe what Bush had claimed. Worse still, the researchers said, the contrary evidence actually strengthened misperceptions among ideological sub-groups. These accounts of how social media filter bubbles and echo chambers work, how hashtag followings reinforce group identity and how difficult it can be to have the facts triumph over ideology have important implications for journalism. Journalists cannot cure human nature of its weaknesses but they would serve democracy better by understanding these predispositions and taking them into account in the extent to which they verify information before publishing it, and in choosing the language in which they express it so that the risk of error is minimised and so that what they do publish does not add to the level of emotional arousal generated by social media. While social media multiplied the risk of re-publishing fakery it also multiplied the means by which fakery might be detected. A comprehensive set of tools for doing this was set out in The Verification Handbook, edited by Craig Silverman of the Poynter Institute.29 Taking a case-study approach, it contained guidance for verifying user-generated content, and sound advice on how to do this under pressure of covering an emergency or disaster. Verification was the central issue in the complex conundrum that confronted the professional mass media in coming to terms with social media. Social media was a vast, irresistible and invaluable resource. Tapping it was not just unavoidable but failure to do so was unthinkable. It would have meant wilfully excluding what had become a primary network for human communications, with all that implied about knowing what was going on in the world. Yet it was unreliable and untrustworthy as a source 29  Silverman, C. (ed) (2014) The Verification Handbook: A Definitive Guide to Verifying Digital Content for Emergency Coverage, Maastricht, European Journalism Centre, https:// verificationhandbook.com/downloads/verification.handbook.pdf accessed 24 May 2020.

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of news, and seen as such by a large proportion of the world’s population, as the Edelman studies had shown. The professional mass media had one asset on which to rely for survival: the perception that, of the two, it was the more trustworthy. Respectful treatment of people, particularly in regard to privacy, was another important issue. Social media worked on the basis that people traded away their privacy, at least to the extent that they shared personal information. Many elements of the professional mass media took the convenient but ethically indefensible view that once posted online, people’s personal information was public property, in defiance of fundamental privacy principles operating in much of the Western world. This was an example of what has been called the diminishment of the public-interest principle on social media.30 It was argued that the individualised approach to news dissemination on social media resulted in an individualised concept of the public interest, ignoring any broader, explicit institutional norms and values of the kind articulated by the various professional associations operating in the field of journalism. In this case the norm concerned respect for personal privacy and conditions under which it might be outweighed by a general public-interest consideration. The professional mass media attempted many ways to integrate its operations with social media beyond using the global platforms for distribution. One was the use of comment streams that opened up to audiences the opportunity to give direct feedback to journalists about something they had written. Another was to encourage journalists to blog and tweet about their stories or the issues they were writing about. In addition, social media imposed its own accountability on the professional mass media by calling out bad behaviour and in some cases generating advertising boycotts. In Sydney in 2019, a social media campaign caused 19 large advertisers to abandon a radio program hosted by a shock jock called Alan Jones. It was estimated to have halved his programme’s revenue of A$12 million. In these ways, social media did have a democratising effect, but it came at a price in staff welfare. After several years, especially in the atmosphere of extremism that developed in Western democracies in the second decade of the twenty-first century, some feedback became so toxic that it became harmful to the staff of professional mass media organisations. Even with 30  Napoli, M. (2019) Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age, New York, Columbia University Press, p. 135.

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vigilant moderation, this effect could not be wholly contained. One everyday example illustrates the point. In September 2020, the State of Victoria in Australia had been subject for several weeks to strict limitations on people’s rights to move around in order to contain a second wave of Covid-19 infections. These measures included a night-time curfew, something never before imposed in Australia outside wartime. As the rate of contagion slowed, pressure began to build on the Government to ease the restrictions. A reporter attending the Premier’s daily media conference, at which updates were given on the pandemic, pressed him on why the restrictions were not being eased more quickly. She was not rude but she was persistent. As a result, she received death threats via social media. It had become commonplace for journalists, especially women, to be trolled on social media, often in violent or misogynistic terms. In 2017, the NGO Freedom House published a research report showing this to be a worldwide phenomenon. It was driving women out of journalism or forcing them to limit their online exposure, which circumscribed their ability to do their job.31 A New York Times journalist told the Freedom House researchers: “I’ve turned off notifications on my Twitter … so if people are sending me nasty stuff I just don’t see it.… They know how to exploit your networks and target your family.” An author and columnist said: “This morning I woke up to a rape and death threat directed at my five-year-old daughter. That this is part of my work life is unacceptable.” A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that 40% of internet users had experienced some form of online harassment. Men were more often the target of troll attacks, except in the field of journalism. Female journalists received more online abuse and trolling attacks than their male counterparts. The attacks were focused not on the content or information reported, but on the journalists themselves. Amanda Hess, a freelance writer, argued that online harassment creates a chilling effect on female journalists.32 Despite the fact that this is clearly a serious occupational health and safety issue, the Freedom House report noted that no solution had been found to it, and that media organisations seemed to have no strategy for

31  https://freedomhouse.org/article/chasing-stories-women-journalists-are-pursuedtrolls accessed 7 October 2020. 32  https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/10/22/introduction-17/ accessed 7 October 2020.

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preventing the harassment or for changing the online operating environment for journalists. At the same time, social media forced the pace of change in the way journalism was done, and the activism it generated was not something that the professional mass media could ignore. For one thing, this activism created real news—advertising boycotts and explosive global movements such as #MeToo—revealing not just wrongdoing by powerful people and organisations, but retaliation. It also created a new news value, what might be called “virality”: if something went viral on social media, that fact alone might make it a story. For serious newspapers, it would need something more—authority or consequence or magnitude of effect—but for more frivolous outlets, virality itself was enough. Traditional publishers and broadcasters rapidly became dependent on these platforms for the dissemination of their content beyond their existing subscribers or established audiences. This relationship became seriously problematic. In order to ensure that their content had a chance of jumping through the algorithmic hoops and gaining a much wider audience than it could have hoped for otherwise, content-makers—the professional mass media—gave their content away free to these platforms. It was immediately an unequal relationship: dependency on the part of the traditional media and news suzerainty on the part of the global platforms. To make matters worse, the global platforms were able to offer extremely cheap advertising rates for potentially global exposure, and so much of the advertising that paid for the making of news content by traditional media drained away to the platforms. So the platforms were eating the traditional media’s lunch in two ways: taking its content for nothing and draining away its revenue base. This created an existential crisis for the professional mass media that was still rampant at the time of writing. In Australia, an independent research outfit, the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, reported in early 2020 that between January 2019 and May 2020, 157 newsrooms in Australia had been closed either permanently or temporarily, a rate of more than two a week.33 Some of that was due to the coronavirus pandemic, which had virtually shut down the national economy in early 2020, but the newsrooms had already been softened up by 15  years of haemorrhaging at the hands of the global platforms. 33  https://drive.google.com/file/d/19QHboi3ItRW2r9XFERcDMt_at5SwDlc3/view accessed 20 May 2020.

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The advent of social media altered the power dynamics between the public and the press, the politicians and the press and the public and politicians. Politicians saw how social media had the potential to lessen the power of the professional mass media by allowing them to speak over the media’s head directly to voters. And voters could see how they could communicate among themselves and back to the politicians without the gatekeepers of the media exercising control over these exchanges. This reduction in the power of the professional mass media paralleled its loss of economic strength and weakened its capacity to perform its institutional functions expected of it under press theory (see Chap. 11). Conversely, the power of social media grew. They were transnational. Governments struggled to see how they could make national sovereignty continue to have meaning where the global platforms were concerned. Societies watched helplessly as the professional media they had relied on for generations was hollowed out as the advertising revenue that sustained them was diverted to social media. Making the platforms accountable and making them subject to the same economic laws regarding competition was still in its infancy in 2020. A proposal by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in 2019 to force the platforms to pay for the news they took for nothing from professional media provoked hostility from the global platforms.34 Other countries, such as Spain, had tried and failed in the face of threats that the global platforms would withdraw their services. In January 2021 the Australian Senate held an inquiry into the Government’s proposal to force Facebook and Google to pay for news. On the inquiry’s first day, Google threatened to withdraw its search services from Australia and Facebook made similar noises. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said his government did not respond to threats. But the issue had a long way to run, and globally the outlook for correcting the imbalance in the relationship between the tech giants and media organisations was grim. In the meantime professional mass media not only survived but remained as essential to democracy as it had ever been. This was demonstrated by the role played by professional mass media in the 2020 US presidential election campaign. The New  York Times revealed details of President Trump’s tax records which, alone among modern presidents, he had tried to keep secret. The major television networks provided sustained 34  https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/inquiries-ongoing/digital-platforms-inquiry/ final-report-executive-summary accessed 15 June 2020.

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coverage of the campaign, including the traditional presidential and vice-­ presidential debates. There was extensive live coverage of events such as President Trump’s contracting of the coronavirus, his hospitalisation, his doctors lying about his condition and the motorcade in which he briefly left hospital to show himself to his supporters outside. It was difficult to imagine what an election campaign would look like, and how large segments of the population would keep track of what was going on, without coverage like this. Getting news online—and especially from social media—requires an individual to make an effort involving several steps. And even before that point, they must be aware enough of the existence of news events to be stimulated into doing it and be motivated enough to make the effort. It is far more complex and requires more much more pro-activity on the part of the individual than simply switching on the television at dinner time, which for many people is habitual. Moreover, in a household of more than one, consuming news online is more solitary than watching television with other members of the household. It is an example of how, even at the household level, the opportunity for a filter bubble to develop is created and the opportunity for a common conversation based on shared intake of information is diminished. At a community level there are well-known demographic sub-groups for whom barriers to digital communication are greater: older people, people whose first language is not that of the nation as a whole, people with low educational attainment and people in lower socio-economic groups.35 Therefore, the greater a society relies on digital delivery of news at the expense of traditional forms of delivery, the more these sub-groups are disenfranchised, and the weaker that society’s democracy becomes. That is a powerful reason why democracies need professional mass media and social media to work together to provide societies with the richest, most diverse and most reliable sources of information, delivered on platforms available to all. If this is to be achieved, then the relationship and interaction between social and professional mass media will need to reach a greater level of maturity than it has to date. This is an aspect of the new Democratic Revival theory of the press presented in Chap. 12.

35  See for example Jung, Y., Peng, W., Moran, M., Jin, S., McLaughlin, M., Cody, M., Jordan-Marsh, M., Albright, J. and Silverstein, M. (2010) “Low-Income Minority Seniors’ Enrollment in a Cybercafé: Psychological Barriers to Crossing the Digital Divide,” Educational Gerontology, Vol 36 No 3.

CHAPTER 11

Theories of the Press

Theories of the press theories are normative: they describe what the press ought to do; they do not always describe what the press actually does. They address these questions: What is freedom of the press for? What does a society need the press to do? Why does the press enjoy the status of an essential institution? Why is freedom of the press given constitutional protection in many different countries? For more than 60 years, theorising about the role and function of the press rested on the foundations laid by Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm in their seminal work, Four Theories of the Press,1 first published in 1956. Their thesis was that the press—by which they meant all mass news media—always takes on the form and coloration of the social and political structures within which it operates.2 At their time of writing, social and political structures and ideologies had developed across the globe alongside communications technologies for 500 years. It was a symbiosis. The process had begun with the political 1  Siebert, F., Peterson, T. & Schramm, W. (1963) Four Theories of the Press, Illini Books ed., Chicago, University of Illinois Press. 2  Ibid., p. 1.

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responses by those in authority to the technological revolution represented by the invention of movable type and the printing press by Gutenberg of Mainz in the 1450s. Initially those responses took the form of various attempts to control the dissemination of information and ideas through the press, discussed in Chap. 7. Over the centuries, there were many sources of influence over the development of press theory. Among the most far-reaching were the ideals of the Enlightenment, the emergence of political ideologies, in particular Communism, and the corrosive effects on public trust caused by the behaviour of industrialised mass media organisations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was from this history that Siebert et al distilled their four theories. They saw each of them as grounded in certain basic beliefs and assumptions held by different societies about the nature of individuals, the nature of society and the state, the relationship between individuals and the state, and the nature of knowledge and truth.3 They saw these theories as a pair of pairs: Authoritarian theory and its derivative Soviet Communist theory (now generally referred to as Revolutionary theory); Libertarian theory and its derivative Social Responsibility theory. The oldest theory and, as Siebert observed, the most pervasive historically and geographically4 was Authoritarian theory. It provided the intellectual justification for the Inquisition and for the ruthless system of press licensing in England. This theory holds that it is for the rulers to decide what the people should know. Moreover, it asserts that the power of the state enables individuals to achieve more than they could on their own and hence the interests of the state take precedence over the interests of the individual. The theory was also grounded in an assumption that the most valuable knowledge and truth would come from an intellectual elite, and that the masses, once properly instructed, would arrive at a unity of thought that conformed to the elite view. To give effect to these assumptions, the theory makes the press a servant of the state, subject to the state’s surveillance and control.5 Revolutionary theory adopts the premises of authoritarian theory and builds on it in two main ways. Firstly, it posits that the platforms of mass  Ibid., p. 10.  Ibid., p. 9. 5  Ibid., p. 16. 3 4

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communication properly belong to the state and the ruling party and not to private individuals. Secondly, as such they exist to be used for state and party purposes: to educate the masses in correct doctrine; to ensure that they are not exposed to ideas that are incompatible with that doctrine; to promote unity of thought and purpose among the masses, and to propagandise on behalf of the state and party.6 Wilbur Schramm, who wrote the chapter on what was then called Soviet Communist theory in Four Theories, captured the essence of the theory—and its effects on human reasoning— in this question put to him by a Russian: “How could one of your elections possibly be free if the wrong side won?”7 To someone schooled in Libertarian theory, the question is absurd, intellectually impossible. As the name itself suggests, the foundations of Libertarian theory are grounded in the ideals of the Enlightenment. Chief among these was the ideal of people as rational beings, eager to seek the truth through reasoned argument. The emphasis on reason was to be the guiding principle of the Enlightenment, that extraordinary period lasting from Milton’s time to the threshold of the French Revolution during which religious dogma gave way to evidence-based truth-seeking. In politics it was a period of ferment during which the ideas of John Locke took root. The relationship between individuals and the state, as posited by Libertarian theory, was that described by Locke in his Second Treatise of Government8 in which he asserted that all legitimate political power resided in the will of the “sovereign people”. Reason and choice were also extolled as the province of the individual. They became foundational arguments in the economic philosophy of Adam Smith, another Enlightenment figure, as set out in The Wealth of Nations. To Libertarian theorists, then, the individual person is the prime unit of civilisation,9 and so the fulfilment of the individual’s aspirations becomes the ultimate goal of society and the prime purpose of the state. The value of individualism was given its most familiar expression in the US Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

 Ibid., p. 121.  Ibid., p. 107. 8  Locke, J. (1690) [1713] Two Treatises of Government, London, John Churchill. 9  Siebert et al., op. cit. at p. 40. 6 7

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The nature of knowledge and truth, for the libertarians, was a Cartesian distillation of reason, logic and scientific experimentation liberated from religious dogma and superstition and discoverable by the contestation of ideas. The strength of faith among Enlightenment men in the ultimate triumph of reasoned truth is powerfully captured in Thomas Jefferson’s polemic on intellectual freedom and progress: Reason and experiment has been indulged, and error has fled before them. Truth can stand by itself.10

A further role of the press in libertarian theory was as a bulwark against tyranny, in particular by government. This came to be called the fourth estate or watchdog function of the press. Despite his detestation of what he called a licentious press and its “abandoned prostitution to falsehood”,11 Jefferson nonetheless retained enough regard for its institutional necessity to say: [W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.12

Yet in Jefferson’s strictures about the “prostitution” of the press lay the seeds of what, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would grow into widespread disaffection with a press that had become not only industrialised but habituated to putting its own interests ahead of the public interest. Its debasement was exemplified by the New York circulation wars of the 1890s between William Randolph Hearst’s Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s World, the crude sensationalism of which spawned the term “yellow journalism”, referred to Chaps. 1 and 5. It was against this background of abuse of power and public disgust that in 1943 Henry Luce, publisher of Time magazine, initiated and largely paid for the Hutchins Commission of inquiry into press functions and standards, also discussed in Chap. 6. Its report, A Free and Responsible

10  Dewey, J. (1941) The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, selected from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Washington, H. A. (ed), Cassell, London, p. 97. 11  Ibid., p. 105. 12  Ibid., p. 110.

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Press,13 and an associated volume by the Commission’s intellectual leader, William Ernest Hocking, Freedom of the Press,14 became the foundations of Social Responsibility theory. The Hutchins Commission project was one of several developments in the United States during the 1940s that suggested the possibility of media reform to counter what was seen as excessive commercialism that had both debased content and driven the build-up of monopolies in newspapers and broadcasting. One such development consisted of measures to counter the monopolies that had stifled competition among media and reduced the diversity of voices. In 1943 The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had forced NBC to divest itself of a major network, followed in 1945 by a Supreme Court ruling that brought down an anti-trust ruling against the Associated Press. To instil in broadcasters the need to meet certain public expectations of their responsibilities, in 1946 the FCC produced what became known as the Blue Book. This made the privilege of holding a broadcasting licence conditional on the meeting of four substantive public-interest requirements. They needed to broaden their programming to include content that was not just about attracting advertising, promote local programmes, broadcast programmes about locally important issues and eliminate excessive advertising.15 Yet neither the FCC reforms nor the Hutchins Commission succeeded in achieving political acceptance of the idea that the media were essentially public utilities in which public-interest considerations should be prioritised over the private rights of media owners. Victor Pickard has argued that the FCC’s Blue Book was largely defeated by broadcasters and their political allies, while the recommendations of the Hutchins Commission were either ignored or co-opted by the media under the guise of “social responsibility”.16 Concerning the fate of the Blue Book reforms, his argument is highly persuasive; concerning the Hutchins Commission recommendations, less so. The influence of the Hutchins Commission on the way journalism in Western democracies worked in the Commission’s aftermath cannot easily be overstated. The American media scholar, C. Edwin Baker, has said that 13  Report of the US Commission on the Freedom of the Press (1947), Chicago, Chicago University Press. 14  Hocking, W.  E., 1947, Freedom of the Press: A Framework of Principle, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, p. 161. 15  Pickard, V. op. cit., pp. 3, 63 & 68. 16  Ibid., p. 193.

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it provided “the most influential modern account of the goals of journalistic performance” and was virtually treated as the “official Western view”.17 The fact that it became the foundation of the social responsibility theory of the press, laying out the basic precepts under which post-War journalism in the West functioned for at least 30 years, is testament to its value. As Herbert Altschull put it, following World War Two the doctrine of social responsibility swept the world as a standard to seek and quickly gained wide acceptance in the press.18 Concerning the nature of man and the relationship between individuals and the state, Social Responsibility theory rested solidly on the foundations laid by Libertarian theory. Concerning the nature of truth and knowledge, however, bitter experience had shown that in the competitive frenzy of nineteenth and twentieth century capitalism, the idea that truth would emerge from the open contest of ideas belonged to the distant past. Social Responsibility theory asserted that the first function of the press was to provide the citizenry with a bedrock of reliable information on which they could participate in political, economic and social life: what Hocking called “the necessary grist for the thinking of the reader”. To this he added what has come to be called the investigative function of the press: to reveal to the people information on matters they have a right to know about.19 For Hocking, truth-telling and impartiality in news reporting lay at the heart of the press’s social responsibility.20 Conversely, a view of press freedom as having nothing to do with truth-telling, justice and non-­ partisanship “wears the aspect of social irresponsibility”.21 The role of the state in Social Responsibility theory was that of residual legatee entrusted to hold the ring between press freedom and accountability; of ensuring “an adequate press performance” without intruding on press activities.22 Referring to the reasoning of Blackstone23 the US Commission argued that this consisted in there being no prior censorship,

17  Baker, C. E. (2002) Media, Markets and Democracy, New York, Cambridge University Press, p. 154. 18  Altschull, J. H. (1995) op. cit., p. 137. 19  Ibid., pp. 179–180. 20  Ibid., p. 197. 21  Ibid., p. 230. 22  Ibid., pp. 182–3. 23  Blackstone, W. (1770) [1897] Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book IV, p. 151.

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while holding the press answerable at law for the consequences of what it published where wrongful harm was done.24 However, while Social Responsibility theory was grounded in the ideal that freedoms carry concomitant obligations, it had nothing to say about how the press might be held to account for how it fulfilled those obligations, nor did it address the problem of media-ownership concentration. And naturally—since it pre-dated the digital revolution by about 60 years—it had nothing to say about the media’s responsibilities in the digital age. Today, these are serious shortcomings. First, there is hypocrisy involved. The press have been set as watchdogs over others in power but in many Western countries have resisted any attempts at being made accountable themselves. As Rudyard Kipling said, the press exercises power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages. Second, there developed in the latter half of the twentieth century a strong public appetite for those in power to be held to account. The Australian political scientist Robert Mulgan explained this as symptomatic of growing public anger at individuals and institutions that were supposed to pursue the public interest but refused to answer the public’s questions or accept their directions.25 Third, concentration of media ownership runs counter to the interests of democracy, as C.  Edwin Baker has cogently argued. Fourth, in the digital age the press has new obligations that were taken for granted when Four Theories was written and were therefore not spelt out. All these considerations are taken into account in the development of a new press theory which is proposed in Chap. 12. In 2006, nearly 60 years after the Commission published its report and with American media ownership even more concentrated, Baker set out his case for opposing ownership concentration, stating that democracy was at a crossroads. A more democratic distribution of communicative power was needed, consistent with normative theories of democracy that said people had an equal right to participate in collective self-determination. This egalitarian principle was supported by the concept of one vote, one value, and as a principle it applied not only to elections but to media as the means by which a self-governing people acquired the capacity to form public opinion and have it influence and ultimately control public will-­ formation. The media constituted what Baker called “a crucial sluice  Hocking, W. E. op. cit., p. 186.  Mulgan, R. (2003) Holding Power to Account: Accountability in Modern Democracies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 1. 24 25

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between public opinion formation and state will-formation”. The media mediated between the public and the government. For this reason, a country was democratic only to the extent that the media, as well as elections, were structurally egalitarian and politically salient. Applied to media ownership, this principle could be plausibly interpreted as requiring a maximum dispersal of media ownership.26 Moreover, he argued, no democracy should risk the danger that an individual decision-maker be in a position to exercise enormous, unequal and hence undemocratic, largely unchecked, potentially irresponsible power. He noted that the structural constitutional separation of powers was designed to reduce the risk of abuse of power in government. The same principle of diluting power should apply to the fourth estate, and this could be achieved by the widest possible dispersal of media power among diverse owners. In what Baker called “complex democracies” where numerous groups competed for attention, pluralist or liberal notions of fairness was the primary value embodied in the democratic distribution principle. Each group needed its fair share of the media to participate in political or cultural struggle. Complex democracy asserted that both egalitarian dispersal and inclusive common discourse were fundamental requirements of democracy despite the tension between them. Finding the “common good” required an inclusive discourse involving the whole society.27 Robert McChesney records that a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission to revise its media-ownership rules in 2002 galvanised a movement to prevent further concentration of media ownership. The FCC proposed allowing one company to own most of the media in any given town, a proposal that would have created a series of near-­ monopolies while at the same time drastically reducing diversity of voice. McChesney and a group of colleagues founded the Free Press organisation to marshal opposition to this proposal and in combination with other interest groups mobilised public interest in what had hitherto been an issue of marginal community importance. The significance of this incident is that it revealed the willingness of the federal regulator to place the interests of a few media owners above the public interest, and how combustible was the public’s dissatisfaction with the way the media was already

 Ibid., pp. 6–7.  Ibid., p. 8.

26 27

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performing. It was another symptom of how out of touch people in power were with the feelings of people in the street.28 Despite the enduring status and influence of Four Theories, it has been the subject of sustained and many-sided critiques. Among the most comprehensive is a collection put together in 1995 by a team of scholars at the University of Illinois, whose Press published the original.29 It makes the point that Four Theories, in its schema, its assumptions, and its tacit acceptance of American capitalist democracy as preferable to the Cold War alternative, Communism, was very much a product of its time and of the intellectual interests of its authors. Doubtless this is an observation that can be made about many books. However, the criticisms run deeper than that. An important one is that the theories are oversimplified; another that it gives the incorrect impression that any press system can be defined by one coherent theory; a third that it is too preoccupied with the relationship between government and the press and pays too little attention to the concentrations of power in the private sector. The giveaway here was that the names of the theories were determined according to the relationship between the press and the state, ignoring the impact of media ownership structures. Finally, it was argued that the four theories were all discussed in terms of classical liberalism, in a sense creating four theories out of the one—Libertarian theory.30 These are cogent criticisms, but for all that Four Theories has exerted an enduring influence. It stimulated what Christians et al called a “fairly rich reservoir of ideas” about how the theories might be extended, added to or improved upon.31 They noted, too, that despite its limitations, Four Theories continued to enjoy considerable respect and wide use. Among the more notable attempts to enlarge the field were those of Denis McQuail, who revisited the issue several times. Among the theories he discussed were Development Media theory and Democratic-participant theory.32 Development Media theory assigned to the press a role as collaborative partner with the state in promoting economic development in 28  McChesney, R. (2014) Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-first Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy, New  York, New  York University Press, pp. 143–144. 29  Nerone, J. (ed) (1995) Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press, Urbana, University of Illinois Press. 30  Nerone, J. & Guback, T. (1995) “Revisiting Four Theories of the Press,” in Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press, Urbana, Illinois University Press, pp. 3–27. 31  Christians, C., Glasser, T., McQuail, D., Nordenstreng, K., & White, R. (2009) Normative Theories of the Media, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, p. 7. 32  McQuail, D. (1994) Mass Communication Theory, 3rd ed., London, Sage, p. 131.

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nations seeking to develop from a position of underdevelopment. Hemant Shah described it as “independent journalism that provided constructive criticism of government and its agencies, informed readers how the development process was affecting them, and highlighted local self-help projects”.33 As Christians et al pointed out, this theory left many questions unresolved, even unasked. How did an ostensibly independent press confine itself to “constructive” criticism of government? What were the consequences when government and media had a mutual interest in maintaining a national consensus?34 Such an arrangement has the potential to create a corrupting conflict of interest between the press and other loci of power. Democratic-participant theory was another response to the disillusionment with the mainstream press’s performance in the middle of the twentieth century. It stated that there was a legitimate demand for local, grassroots information and for the right of the community to answer back, to engage in a dialogue with a press that had become uniform, centralised, expensive to enter, commercialised and, in some cases, state-controlled. It supported the development of underground or alternative newspapers, and community-based radio and television stations.35 In the late 1980s, a new approach to press theory emerged in the work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.36 They developed a theory of the press called the “propaganda model”. Although initially published in 1988, it was subsequently updated to incorporate reflections on the effect of the internet and globalised digital communications in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Herman and Chomsky asserted that people who lived in capitalist democracies were reduced from the status of fully rounded citizens to the narrow status of consumers. They remained individuals with rights to choose, but this reduction in status and narrowing of their role in society had been foisted on them, not chosen wittingly or willingly by them. This consumer-oriented society was divided into classes with different interests. One such class was what they called a privileged elite, where 33   Shah, H. (1996) ‘Modernisation, Marginalisation, and Emancipation: Toward a Normative Model of Journalism and National Development’, Communication Theory, No. 6 (May), pp. 143–66. 34  Christians et al., op. cit., p. 202. 35  McQuail, D., op. cit., pp. 131–2. 36  Herman, E. & Chomsky, N. (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, New York, Pantheon Books.

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power and money were concentrated, and of which the media themselves were part. The state was integrated into this elite and for the media the state was a source of both revenue (through advertising) and information, which is after all the media’s lifeblood. Thus the press had an interest in maintaining the status quo, suppressing dissent and helping to legitimise government action regardless of moral considerations, what they called a “system-supported propaganda function”. Herman and Chomsky argued that the combination of these factors had distorted the public sphere, a term they borrowed from Jurgen Habermas.37 It meant, roughly speaking, a place where citizens, government and interest groups could engage in an open debate about how a society is to govern itself. Herman and Chomsky said that the steady advance and cultural power of marketing and advertising had caused what other theorists summarised as “the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticised consumer culture”.38 So the relationship between individual people and the state had become weakened in its political sense and strengthened in its consumer sense. The nature of knowledge and truth in this theory took the form of propaganda. The argument went that the media mobilised support for the interests of the privileged elite that dominated state and private activity, and that what the media published or suppressed was best understood when seen in that light. They acknowledged that this was not all the media did, but that the propaganda function was a very important part of what they did. They argued that the media as an institution selected journalists who would make decisions in the interests of the elites, who internalised the views and interests of those elites and who would censor themselves if necessary to adjust to the requirements of the powerful. They called this a “guided market system” of information in which it was the media’s function to inculcate in individuals the values, beliefs and codes of behaviour that would integrate them into the institutional structures of the wider society. Thus the “truth” became an interpretation of the world that reflected the interests and concerns of the privileged groups. Herbert Altschull, whose thinking touched Herman and Chomsky’s at several points, also proposed a paradigm different from Four Theories but nonetheless reflecting their broad proposition that the press takes on the 37  Habermas, J. (1962 [1991]), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Burger, T. (trans), Cambridge, Mass, The MIT Press. 38  Robins, K. & Webster, F. (1999), Times of the Technoculture, London, Routledge, p. 227.

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colouration of its society. He proposed three categories of press according to the nature of the nation states it is part of: market nations (roughly equivalent to capitalist democracies), communitarian nations (roughly equivalent to socialist or communist societies) and advancing nations (roughly equivalent to emerging political and economic societies).39 A further line of theoretical discussion, called “communication technology determinism” also gained some traction towards the end of the twentieth century and began to look prophetic in the early years of the twenty-first. It was concerned with the effects of the interaction between media technologies and human beings, and posited that the nature of communications in the public sphere was largely determined by the available technology. It was given extra vigour by the development of interactivity in digital communications: comment streams and social media posts, two completely new human behaviours brought about by the digital communications revolution. These seemed to bear out the theory’s fundamental proposition. In 2019 some important new thinking was added to this theory.40 This was an argument that press freedom was no longer just about freedom from constraints, nor was it just about freedom for the press to choose what its freedom meant. Working out what that freedom meant, and how it ought to be exercised, had become a collaborative endeavour between the press, technological innovators and the wider society. Technology had given society the means to assert its right to have a say in this endeavour while at the same time giving the press the means by which to open itself to these new voices. In the early twenty-first century, new theories emerged based on what were called Asian values. In essence these theories differed from Western theories by giving primacy to communitarianism, or the interests of collective society, over those of individuals. This obviously provided a sharp contrast with the individualism to which Libertarian and Social Responsibility theories gave primacy. One of the most comprehensive of the Asian theories was proposed by Jiafei Yin, who argued that Asian media systems did not fit press theories

 Altschull, op. cit., p. 247.  Ananny, M. (2019) Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures for a Public Right to Hear, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press. 39 40

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developed in the West.41 She argued that in Asian societies, especially those under the influence of Confucian thought, the strength of a country was regarded as more important than the profitability of a company, and the well-being of a family as more important than individual rights and freedom. These reflected her press theory’s particular assumption about the relationship between individuals and society. Jiafei Yin noted that the basis of Libertarian theory lay in Western libertarian philosophy that gave primacy to individual independence, as spelt out in Mill’s On Liberty, or individual rights as set out by Locke in his Second Treatise of Government. She contrasted these with Confucian philosophy, with its focus on the state and the family: Confucius believed that only when the state and families were strong could the well-being of individuals be guaranteed. In the equation of the state, family, and individuals, in Confucian societies individuals were often encouraged and expected to sacrifice their own rights and interests for the sake of the state and family if conflicts between the two should arise. Concerning the nature of society and the state, Jiafei Yin’s assumptions were quite different from those of Western theorists. She stated that in countries like Japan and Thailand, the royal family and often the government were symbols of the nation, and by virtue of that fact they commanded respect. Such a cultural tradition contradicted the ultimate goal of libertarian philosophies—individuals as an end in themselves—and the Western concept of media as a watchdog. More broadly, Jiafei Yin stated that Asian societies saw freedom and responsibility as co-ordinates. She contrasted Locke’s philosophy, which stated that each individual had natural rights, including the right to life and liberty, with the Confucian emphasis on responsibility and loyalty to the group. This did not always serve the public interest. In Japan, Jiafei Yin said, the media kept cosy relations with the government and big business through the press club system, or “information cartels”, which comprised press clubs, industry associations and media conglomerates. The press clubs channelled information from government offices to media organisations. According to Japanese critiques, such a club system discouraged independent reporting and thoroughness in journalistic investigations and 41  Jiafei, Y. (2008) Beyond the Four Theories of the Press: A New Model for the Asian & the World Press, monograph published by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

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resulted in “uniformity of content” and “pro-establishment style of journalism”. In Asian societies, the motto promoted was not Darwin’s survival of the fittest, but the survival of all. South Korean scholars had noted a similar pattern there. However, in 1998 with the election of Kim Dae Jung as president, the South Korean press started to phase out the press club system and became more aggressive in covering the government and more vocal in criticising government policies. But in 2001 the Government cracked down on the major newspapers with charges of tax evasion, leaving press freedom fragile in South Korea. Writing in 2008,  Jiafei Yin assessed the press in Hong Kong and Thailand as the freest in Asia when dealing with non-political topics, but cautious when news stories concern politics, the government, or—in Thailand—the royal family. She stated that before Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, many of the newspapers in the former British colony were pro-British. Since the sovereignty changed hands, more papers became pro-Beijing. She considered self-censorship to be a major concern and the main threat to an independent and free press in Hong Kong despite a great deal of aggressive reporting. Part of the problem of press self-censorship was due to the fact that after Hong Kong was returned to China, the ownership of some of the major newspapers, including the South China Morning Post changed hands. The new owners had investments on the Chinese mainland and did not want to offend the officials in Beijing. In 2020, 12 years after Jiafei Yin was writing, concerns over press freedom and other civil and political rights in Hong Kong intensified when the Hong Kong legislature rubber-stamped a new security law imposed by Beijing to crack down on political dissent. It would be policed by Beijing authorities. Large and sometimes violent street protests followed. In December 2020, Jimmy Lai, owner of Apple Daily, a strongly pro-­ democracy news platform in Hong Kong, was imprisoned by the Beijing-­ dominated Hong Kong authorities for allegedly breaking the terms of an office lease. However, Jiafei Yin was careful to point out that there were some overlaps between Western and Eastern cultures and corresponding values. She pointed out that there had been Western philosophers such as Plato and Rousseau who put emphasis on the state and the collective rather than the individual, and preferred rule by the elite, which was close to the Confucian ideal of government.

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In the East, there were also philosophical schools such as Taoism that focused on individuality and extolled the virtue of the full and free development of the potential of each individual. However, these philosophical schools in the East or the West had not become the dominant influence in their respective cultures. By and large, contemporary Western societies extolled freedom and individuality, while Asian societies emphasised interests of the collective and the concept of responsibility. The humanocentric theory of the press developed by Shelton Gunaratne42 was consistent with the broad sweep of Asian theories but with a difference. It posited that interdependence and mutual causality were more important to the harmonious working of society than the individualism of the West. In other words, a primary function of the press was to explain events by reference to the interdependence of a society’s members and point to the ways in which the actions of each affected the fortunes of all. It is instructive to reflect on the extent to which all these theories— Western and Eastern—share certain fundamental ideals, the most important of which is that the press exists to serve society. It does this is different ways, informed by history, philosophy, culture and political systems, and while our common humanity requires that it carries out these functions in a way that upholds the values of truth-telling, fairness and respect for persons, political ideologies and the weaknesses in the press itself sometimes get in the way. Moreover, none of the theories discussed here attempted to grapple with the broad social and political consequences of social media and the implications for how the professional mass media should respond to this revolutionised environment. That is the subject of Chap. 12.

42  Gunaratne, S. (2005) The Dao of the Press: A Humanocentric Theory, New  York, Hampton Press.

CHAPTER 12

A New Press Theory: Democratic Revival

No attested knowledge can stand on its own. Facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media. —Bruno Latour Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime

By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Western democracy stood at a moment in time when new thinking about political communication was needed. Social media, made possible by digital technology, had given rise to the echo-chamber phenomenon, in which participants in public debate were able to communicate on matters of general public interest with like-minded individuals and exclude themselves from exposure to other perspectives. Paradoxically, a technology with the capacity to bridge social divisions had instead widened them. There was substantial evidence that this intensified political partisanship, created a fragmented and debased public discourse, and undermined acceptance that those holding views different from one’s own were entitled to political legitimacy. As a response to these effects, a new normative theory of the media is timely. It is proposed as Democratic Revival theory and draws on elements of Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Democratic-participant theories © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Muller, Journalism and the Future of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7_12

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(Siebert, et al, 1956; McQuail 1983; Christians, et al, 2009). It has four central propositions. The first is an explicit recognition by the professional mass media of its essential role as the carrier of the common public conversation, and responsibility to provide reliable information on which that conversation can proceed. The second is that the professional mass media must renew their commitment to certain ethical norms, in particular truth-telling, verification, impartiality, integrity, editorial independence, tolerance, pluralism and respect for persons. The third proposition is that professional mass media recalibrate its relationship with social media so as to maximise the potential for a constructive symbiosis to become the norm. The fourth is that the professional mass media must be prepared to accept not only that they are accountable for how they use their power but that they must be open to accepting independent mechanisms that make media accountability real. At the same time, social media platforms must accept that they too are subject to accountability through mechanisms established by the institutions of democratic polities.

Proposition 1: Carrier of the Common Conversation Social media has created a multiplicity of conversations isolated from one another. Essential to a revival in democracy’s health is the restoration of a common conversation among citizens, one that allows them to identify, prioritise, and propose responses to, issues of common concern. The professional mass media, although weakened by the unremitting flow of its revenue to social media platforms from about 2005, remains the vehicle that carries this common conversation into the 2020s. Understandably, up until the emergence of social media, this function of the professional mass media had been taken for granted in the established literature on normative media theory. Other functions had been quite explicitly articulated, most notably as part of social responsibility theory formulated in the late 1940s and mid-1950s, as described in Chap. 11. However, because the provision of a common conversation among members of democratic polities had been the natural and exclusive preserve of the professional mass media, it had been unnecessary to single it out for explicit mention. It is now necessary to do so. What has been seen with the algorithm-controlled news feed of social media—Negroponte’s “Daily Me”—is what might be called the second face of censorship. There has long been a pre-occupation with the first face of censorship, being authoritarian restraints on free speech, but this

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second face of censorship—the shutting out of alternative perspectives and the spreading of fake news—has been shown to be just as anti-democratic. Fragmentation in news and opinion creates different communications universes, and the evidence showing the extent of this fragmentation is strong. A powerful factor in the development of fragmentation has been the creation of hashtags. The study of two competing hashtags, #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter, by Gallagher et al in 20161 demonstrates this, as discussed in Chap. 5. The researchers found significant differences in the way the issue of violence between African-Americans and police were framed by each hashtag. One difference was that #BlackLivesMatter carried a proportionally higher discussion of African-American deaths than did #AllLivesMatter. By contrast, within #AllLivesMatter the only lives that were significantly discussed were those of law enforcement officers. The contribution social media makes to fragmentation and polarisation is intensified when mass media also become politically polarised. The study by Gregory Martin and Ali Yurukoglu (2017),2 described in Chap. 5, showed the connections between television viewing habits and voting intentions. As discussed in Chap. 2, Levitsky and Ziblatt argued that extreme partisan polarisation weakens democratic norms.3 They asserted that a necessary response to this was the reinvigoration of institutional gatekeeping, including by the media4 and, in the “fake news” environment created by the presidency of Donald Trump, a recommitment to truth-telling.5 Democratic Revival theory posits that in the face of these developments the professional mass media have a responsibility to recognise that it is they who, because of long-established experience, extensive reach, market power, brand identification and privileges, are called upon to provide a 1  Gallagher, Ryan J.; Reagan, Andrew J.; Danforth, Christopher M. and Sheridan Dodds, Peter, 2018, “Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter”, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195644 accessed 4 June 2018. 2  Martin, G. and Yurukoglu, A. (2017) “Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization, American Economic Review, vol 107(9), pp. 2565–99. 3  Levitsky, S. and Ziblatt, D., 2018, How Democracies Die, Viking Penguin Random House, London, p. 9. 4  Ibid., p. 56. 5  Ibid., pp. 181–203.

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reliable and respectful informational basis for a common conversation among citizens. If this conversation is to have its desired effect, it must have certain qualities that counter fragmentation and polarisation. It must be based on reliable information untainted by journalistic opinion, drawn from a diverse range of relevant perspectives and conveyed in language of a kind suited to civil discourse, respectful of persons and of difference. This requires a rebalancing of the concept of free speech with the harm principle, such that the latter is given greater weight. Eighteenth-century libertarian notions of unbridled free speech have shown themselves to be quaintly unsuited to the climate of populism and hate speech that came to dominate much public debate in Western democracies in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This requires a reassertion of the importance of the gatekeeping function. In the first romantic glow of hopefulness that social media would have a democratising influence on communications for the benefit of all, the gatekeeping function was much despised as a legacy of traditional mass media. It was seen as the means by which these pre-digital media platforms kept out inconvenient views that disrupted what Herman and Chomsky called the “propaganda” role of media in capitalist democracies (see Chap. 11). Even allowing for its abuses, as discussed in Chap. 7, the lack of gatekeeping has been seen to have harmful consequences, especially for racial, religious and social minorities, who have become targets of unfiltered hate speech. It has also allowed terrorists to use social media as a platform for recruitment and for publicising their acts of barbarism. An egregious example was the uploading to Facebook of bodycam footage showing an Australian-born white supremacist shooting dead 51 Muslims while they knelt in prayer at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019.

Proposition 2: Commitment to Certain Ethical Norms The required qualities of the common conversation proposed here imply adherence to certain ethical norms. None of these ethical norms is new but the application of them takes new forms in the digital age. Commitment to them became weakened in the scramble by established media to find ways of surviving the digital revolution’s onslaught on their business

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model from 2005 onwards (see Chap. 8). At first they tried to keep up with the internet’s news-breaking speed and relentless continuity. Having swiftly found that this was impossible, they began to harvest online content and re-present it in news stories without having first verified that it was true. For a decade or so, an ethically indefensible mantra took hold: “If it’s wrong, it won’t be wrong for long.” In other words, someone would see an error online and draw it to the platform’s attention, whereupon it would be corrected. Prior verification thus became, in some newsrooms, a luxury to be indulged only if it meant the platform could still be first with the story.6 Prior verification of facts is not a luxury but a fundamental necessity: the power of misinformation and disinformation to overwhelm truth has been amply demonstrated (see Chap. 6). When norms and institutions that are meant to sustain factual knowledge are degraded, other dimensions of political discourse—partisanship and power—fill the gap. The degradation of factual accountability yields what Jay Rosen has called “a political style in which power gets to write its own story”.7,8 A common conversation based on erroneous facts is worse than no common conversation at all. The Miltonian and Millian ideal that truth would be distilled from a free contest in ideas became, in the twenty-first century, a utopian vision from a distant past. The concepts of “fake news” and “alternative facts” corrupted the process. To fulfil Democratic Revival theory, the professional mass media must reassert the fundamental importance of being right, and prioritise it ahead of being first. One of the many benefits of the online world is that it provides a new range of verification techniques that some researchers have categorised as “explicit”, “hybrid circular” or “hybrid background”.9 Explicit strategies refer to the use of computer-based tools to verify material online. Hybrid circular strategies combine searching, selection and use of other online sources. Hybrid background involves the journalist’s checking the origin  Muller, D. (2011) Media Ethics and Disasters, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press.  Rosen, J. (2018) “Why Trump is Winning and the Press is Losing”, New York Review of Books, April 25. 8  Graves, L. & Wells, C. (2019) “From Information Availability to Factual Accountability” in Katz, J. & Mays, K. (eds) Journalism & Truth in an Age of Social Media, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 40. 9  Lecheler, S., Kruikemeier, S. & de Haan, Y. (2019) “Using and Verifying Online Sources” in Katz, J. & Mays, K. (eds), Journalism and Truth in an Age of Social Media, New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 167–181. 6 7

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or background of a specific source or platform. Democratic Revival theory requires the use of whatever techniques are relevant and practicable to ensure the highest level of reliability. A recommitment to impartiality is another requirement implicit in Democratic Revival theory. A threshold requirement is that news reportage should be separated from opinion, a distinction lost in the scramble to match the rhetorical and often crude excitement of social media discourse. Impartiality is a complex concept dealt with in Chap. 8, but may be briefly summarised here as requiring six elements: factual and contextual accuracy; fairness of portrayal by reference to those facts; balance, which follows the weight of evidence; open-mindedness, an approach to reporting that shows a preparedness to include the full range of principal relevant perspectives on an issue, moderated against the requirement for balance; absence of conflict of interest, and decision-making based on established news values of the kind defined at various times by scholars such as Galtung and Ruge10 (1965), McQuail11 and Harcup and O’Neill.12 Closely allied to impartiality is the requirement to promote pluralism in public discourse. Shutting out voices or viewpoints purely on the basis of prejudice has no place in a truly common conversation, particularly at a time when professional media need to provide an alternative to the highly prejudiced and frequently offensive clamour of social media echo chambers. The concepts of scapegoating and of its polar opposite, pluralism, are discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4. Democratic Revival theory requires professional mass media to report in such a way as to minimise the risk of scapegoating and maximise pluralism. A further ethical requirement of Democratic Revival theory is the reassertion of editorial independence. This has become compromised in several ways. At the commercial level, there has been a breakdown in the separation between news and advertising content. This breakdown goes under the general name of hybrid journalism.13 It is fundamentally deceptive because it presents advertising as if it is news, and typically any 10  Galtung, J. and Ruge, M. (1965) “The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in Norwegian Newspapers”, Journal of International Peace Research Vol 1, pp. 64–91. 11  McQuail, D., Mass Communication Theory, 3rd ed, Sage, London. 12  Harcup, T. and O’Neill, D., 2001, “What is News? Galtung and Ruge Revisited”, Journalism Studies Vol 2 No 2, pp. 261–280. 13  Muller, D., 2016, “Conflict of Interest: Hybrid Journalism’s Central Ethical Challenge”, Ethical Space Vol 13 No 2/3, pp. 95–109.

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­ eclaration that it is in fact advertising is hard to find. “Advertorial”, the d analogue forerunner of digital hybrid journalism, typically was presented in typography and layout that made it clearly distinguishable from news content, and commonly was clearly labelled “advertising”. Editorial independence has also become compromised at the political level and has led to the polarisation of news outlets that has both reflected and magnified political and social polarisation in the wider society, as shown by the work of Martin and Yurukoglu referred to earlier. The pre-­ eminent example was the morphing of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation from a news organisation to a propaganda outfit committed to reactionary politics. It was credited by insiders of President Trump’s 2016 campaign as being crucial to Trump’s electoral success, and by Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independent Party, as crucial to the success of the Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum.14 Editorial independence is also demonstrated by treating the interests of a news platform’s proprietor no differently from the treatment of others’ interests. The essentials of editorial independence were captured in the charter of editorial independence adopted by The Age, Melbourne, in 1988 when the newspaper faced the prospect of falling into the hands of the British newspaper robber baron, Robert Maxwell. In 1991, Maxwell disappeared from his yacht in the Bay of Biscay and was later found dead at sea. He never got his hands on the paper, but the charter survived. It stated that the proprietors acknowledge that journalists, artists and photographers must record the affairs of the city, state, nation and the world fairly, fully and regardless of any commercial, political or personal interests, including those of any proprietors, shareholders or board members. It also stated that full editorial control of the newspaper, within a negotiated, fixed budget, was vested in the editor, and that the editor alone should determine the editorial content. A further consideration is that Democratic Revival theory is being developed under global political and communications circumstances where online communications exchanges are global and transcend the borders of nation states. This expands the bases on which people develop a sense of identity to include global affiliation with others of like mind, shared interests or shared belief systems. It follows that a necessary element in Democratic Revival theory is respect for persons regardless of 14  The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, Episode 3, BBC documentary series, broadcast September 2020.

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nationality, ethnicity, race, colour, sexual orientation, religion or political persuasion.

Proposition 3: Recalibrating the Social Media Relationship A third central proposition of Democratic Revival theory is that professional mass media must recalibrate its relationship with social media so as to maximise the potential for a constructive symbiosis to become the norm. It is not only unavoidable but essential that the professional mass media perform their functions in a way that enables them to complement the socially, economically and politically powerful qualities of social media and to harness those qualities in ways that enable both social and professional mass media to optimally perform the functions required by democratic polities. The good that can result when this happens was vividly demonstrated by the impact globally of the coverage of George Floyd’s killing. Social media made everyone who saw it an eye-witness. Everyone who saw the policeman kneeling on Mr Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, who heard his cry, “I can’t breathe,” experienced this appalling crime almost as if they were standing on the footpath with the other horrified but paralysed witnesses. The emotional as well as the cognitive impact of this experience was immense. The combination of social media’s ubiquity, immediacy and capacity to make emotional impact, coupled with professional mass media’s brand reputation, procedures of verification, and capacity to simultaneously reach many millions of people offline and online, generated a response that went global almost immediately. Here was a vivid example of how the peoples of entire nations were provided with a common verified set of information and images on which a common conversation could then proceed. Of course, social media echo chambers developed around these events too, but the initiating wave of information was carried by a combination of social media and professional mass media platforms. The essential facts were there to be seen by all. There was no scope for what Silvio Waisbord called “post-truth communication”.15 15  Waisbord, S. (2018) “The Elective Affinity between Post-truth Communication and Populist Politics”, Communication Research and Practice 4, No 1, pp. 17–34 https://doi. org/10.1080/22041451.2018.1428928 accessed 3 January 2021.

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Tragic though the death of Mr Floyd was, and horrendous as the ensuing police violence was—including against the professional mass media—these events were a demonstration of what democracy can mean: the sovereign people exerting sovereignty, informed by the evidence from social media verified by, and then given the authority of, professional mass media. Recalibrating the relationship between social media and professional mass media also involves a review of news values. As James Webster argues, the economics of the news industry have shifted towards the logics of the “attention economy”.16 This implies that in addition to the pre-digital news values of magnitude, conflict, negativity, proximity, significance and so on, the news value of virality needs to be added. However, in order that other, non-news, values be protected, virality—like all other news values— needs to be mediated against truthfulness, respect for persons and social responsibility. Virality left to itself would simply amplify the lies, crudity and divisiveness which already proliferate in the unmediated online world. If too much attention is paid to virality as a news value, two distortions are possible. At the start of the news process, it will distort the selection of stories to be pursued, and at the end of the process it will distort the way stories are presented. Virality also imposes on journalists the necessity to keep track of how stories are being received and how they are developing online. This became a particular challenge during the presidency of Donald Trump, who basically governed by Tweet. But before Trump became president, the use of social media as an agenda-building tool was well-established. While in a general sense—leaving Trump out of it—there are doubts about the agenda-building capacity of tweeting, its “always-on” nature demands attention from journalists because it is impossible to predict what will suddenly turn out to be important. There is research to show that it is this aspect of political tweeting—its ability to excite journalists—that is important.17 What it is about political tweets that gives rise to this excitement—what news values other than virality are in play—is a vital ingredient in the recalibration of the relationship between professional mass media and 16  Webster, J. (2014) The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences take Shape in a Digital Age, Cambridge MA, MIT Press. 17  Parmalee, J. (2013) “The Agenda-building Function of Political Tweets”, New Media & Society, vol 16, no 3, pp. 434–450 accessed 5 November 2020.

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social media. If it is mere sensationalism or trafficking in material that has no connection with established news values, then professional mass media who pick it up are simply adding to the public’s information overload without any corresponding public benefit. Virality alone will seldom be enough to justify further exposure. Some other news value will normally be required. Developing a more mature relationship between professional mass media and social media is a complex task. However, much has been learnt from the first 15 years or so of their co-existence, and this provides guidance for the future. The first lesson, painfully learnt, was that social media content is not, ipso facto, journalism. It is raw material for journalism. It must be subjected to scrutiny, verification, double-checking and conformity to the requirements of journalistic ethics before being given the authority of publication in professional mass media. In the early years of social media, failure to recognise and adhere to this principle resulted in the publication by professional mass media of much content that turned out to be wrong and harmful to individuals. That further undermined trust in professional mass media and created a climate of public opinion receptive to the concept of “fake news” promoted by the Trump administration for its own bamboozling purposes. A related lesson was that providers of online content from non-journalists must be treated by journalists as sources, not as fellow journalists. This was starkly illustrated by the case of the Wikileaks War Logs, as described in Chap. 9. Another element in the maturing of the relationship between professional mass media and social media is what the former editor-inchief of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has called “mutualisation”. By this he meant not only inviting the public to comment on the news through the newspaper’s comment stream but opening its online columns to public contributions. This was subject to the usual requirements that the material be factually accurate and conform to accepted standards of public taste and decency. This was a recognition of the need for the professional mass media to refrain from adding to the emotional arousal which had become a socially destructive aspect of social media, and in fact to stand against it. A further aspect of the relationship between social media and professional mass media concerned intrusions on people’s privacy. A fundamental privacy principle is that material supplied for one purpose may not be used for another purpose without the consent of the supplier. From the earliest days of social media, some elements in the professional

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mass media took the position that once material had been shared on social media, it had been published, was in the public domain and therefore available to be reused in whatever context suited the news of the day without the knowledge or consent of the supplier. Other elements of the professional mass media, in particular the public-sector broadcasters, took a stricter view. For example, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation required its journalists to base any decision concerning the reuse of social media content on a range of criteria, including the newsworthy person’s reasonable expectation about the extent to which the material would be disseminated as assessed by a series of considerations about who posted it and how it came into the wider public domain. If consent could not be obtained, a public interest test was to be applied, and a judgement made about whether the impact of the material’s use on the person concerned outweighed the public interest. Finally, ABC journalists were required to assess whether the use of the material in the proposed context would be likely to humiliate or otherwise do harm disproportionate to the public interest served. These are standards which recognise the dignity and autonomy of individuals, concepts central to liberal democratic values and hence central to the revitalisation of democracy and the rebuilding of public trust in institutions.

Proposition 4: Accepting the Need for Real Accountability This is perhaps the most challenging proposition of the four. As demonstrated in Chap. 9, newspapers in the Anglophone democracies have fiercely resisted the creation of any mechanism that would exert meaningful accountability on them. The roots of this resistance may be traced back to the imposition of press licensing in England in the sixteenth century and the recognition from the late eighteenth century onwards of the fundamental necessity of a free press to the development of modern democracy. While newspapers in some Scandinavian countries have accepted statutory mechanisms of accountability, their historical and cultural background is entirely different from that of the Anglophone democracies. Therefore it would be unreasonable to argue that simply because statutory mechanisms are accepted in Scandinavia, they should be

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accepted everywhere. On the other hand, voluntary self-regulation through press councils has proved to be a weak and ineffectual means of holding newspapers to account. Press councils have become extinct in the United States. In Britain, there is a mess of competing bodies none of which meets the threshold of accountability laid down by the Leveson inquiry (see Chap. 9). In Australia the press council is a creature of the newspaper industry, dependent entirely on that industry for resources and treated with disdain by significant elements of it. It is almost invisible to the public: research showed that only 4% of voters nationally knew of its existence.18 By contrast, news and current affairs on radio and television has been caught in the dragnet of statutory accountability as a result of the overall system of radio and television licensing established during the twentieth century as each of these technologies came into existence. Statutory licensing of news and current affairs is an historical anomaly and affront to the principle of press freedom, yet remains largely unremarked. At the time of writing, the internet remained almost entirely unregulated. Online content of newspapers came under the remit of the press councils in Britain and Australia. Online content of radio and television came under the remit of the statutory authorities Ofcom in Britain and the Australian Communications and Media Authority. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission applied a very light regulatory touch to online content, focused mainly on issues of access. At the time of writing, the Australian government was attempting to force the global platforms, particularly Google and Facebook, to sign up to a mandatory code, embodied in legislation,19 under which they would pay Australian professional mass media organisations for the news they re-published. The code would represent a global precedent, so the stakes for the tech giants were high. Google at first retaliated by threatening to withdraw its search service from Australia, to which the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison replied: “We don’t respond to threats.” Google then entered into agreements with individual news organisations under which it would pay for news. In February 2021 Facebook retaliated against the government’s 18  Muller, D. (2006) Media Accountability in a Liberal Democracy, Melbourne, University of Melbourne unpublished doctoral thesis retrievable at http://repository.unimelb.edu. au/10187/1552, p. 167 accessed 6 January 2021. 19  Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Act, 2021. (The detailed arrangements for the code were set out in amendments to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010.).

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proposal by switching off its news feed from Australian media. It switched it on again a few days later after a damaging public backlash and a face-­ saving discussion with the Australian government. Facebook eventually reached an accommodation with the government after it made some minor amendments to save Facebook’s face, and began negotiating with Australian publishers. Any discussion about media accountability in Anglophone democratic polities necessarily begins with an examination of the concept of press freedom, since this is the rock on which all attempts at exerting meaningful accountability have so far foundered. From the United States in the 1940s to Britain and Australia in the 2010s commercial media organisations have sounded the tocsin about tyranny and government dictatorship whenever serious attempts have been made at holding them to account. Proponents of such attempts were characterised in brutally crude terms as the equivalent of Stalin or Hitler, Kim Jong Un or Mao Tse-tung. This has been the fate of those such as Larry Fly of the FCC over the Blue Book, Brian (Lord Justice) Leveson, over his proposed reforms of the British press council system20 and Justice Ray Finkelstein and Professor Matthew Ricketson, who conducted an inquiry into media accountability in Australia contemporaneously with the 2011 Leveson inquiry and proposed a statutory authority for the purpose.21 In their unrestrained attacks on these would-be reformers, commercial media organisations have focused entirely on only one of the two sides of press freedom: their own negative freedom from government (or any other external) mechanism of accountability. They have carefully avoided any reference to everybody else’s positive freedom: the freedom for the right to have a press that provides reliable information on which the sovereignty of the people depends, and which presents a diverse range of opinions. Their cynical and self-serving approach is captured in A. J. Leibling’s biting aphorism that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”22 20  Leveson Inquiry—Report into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the press, London, UK Government, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/leveson-inquiry-reportinto-the-­culture-practices-and-ethics-of-the-press accessed 4 January 2021. 21  Report of the Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation, Canberra, Australian Government, https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display. w3p;query=Id:%22library/lcatalog/00380162%22 accessed 4 January 2021. 22  Leibling, A.  J. (1960) “The Wayward Press: Do you Belong in Journalism?”, New Yorker, 14 May, p. 109.

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The positive freedom of the press was powerfully asserted by the US Supreme Court in 1945 when the Associated Press, a dominant newswire service, appealed unsuccessfully against the judgement of a federal district court that it had engaged in anti-competitive behaviour. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion held that freedom of the press protected all sections of society, not just media owners. The court stated that the First Amendment rested on the assumption that “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public” and that “freedom to publish means freedom for all and not for some.”23 This was echoed in a statement by the Hutchins Commission two years later that freedom of the press was freedom from and freedom for. More recently, a perspective from economics has been added to this case for giving greater weight to the positive freedom of the press. This concerns the concept of “merit goods”.24 These are goods that are essential to the functioning of society but which the market fails to produce in the necessary quality or quantity because individuals undervalue them. This analysis comprehensively undercuts one of the media industry’s standard tropes about accountability: that it is held accountable in the market place every day as people consume or decline to consume its output. These two lines of defence run by the media industry for decades—that any attempt to make them independently accountable is tyrannical, and that they are accountable every day through sales and ratings—have proved extremely durable and politically effective. However, the persistent and democratically damaging failures of the press over those many decades have shown that self-regulation as accepted by the Hutchins Commission as part of social responsibility theory is a serious weakness. Democratic Revival theory posits that it is essential now to remedy that weakness. Among other things this requires acceptance at government-policy level that journalism is a merit good serving the freedom of citizens to have reliable and diverse sources of information on matters of public interest, and that the provision of this can no longer be left to self-regulation. One of the criticisms levelled at Four Theories is that it did not in fact present a theory of the press but an explanation, from the perspective of its three authors, of why media systems are what they are, and a catalogue  Associated Press v United States, 326 US 1, 30 (1945).  See, for example, Freedman, D. (2008) The Politics of Media Policy, Cambridge, Polity Press, pp. 8–10. 23 24

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of historical relations between media and state. One such critic, John C. Nerone, referred with approval to the unpublished work of Jay Jenson, another communications scholar at the University of Illinois. Jenson proposed that a civilisation’s worldview is the determining influence on its media.25 The worldview within which the authors of Four Theories worked was that of Western civilisation, what is called liberalism, the elements of which were explored in Chap. 3. As has been shown in the previous chapter in the discussion of Asian theories, other civilisations bring a different worldview to the formation of press theory. The worldview of a civilisation is discernible through the work of its philosophers. So just as liberalism, with its prioritising of the individual over the collective, is the product of Western philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Mill, so communitarianism in Asian societies, with its prioritising of the collective over the individual, has its roots in Confucianism. As we see in the contemporary world, democracy can flourish in both worldviews. Therefore, Democratic Revival theory proposes that the press can make its proportional contribution to the workings of democracy regardless of the worldview that has created the press’s circumstances in civilisations with different worldviews. A further criticism of Four Theories was that it considered the position of the press relative only to government, and not also to its position relative to its corporate owners. This opens a larger question: when we talk about freedom of the press, whose freedom are we talking about? The word “press” in the phrase “freedom of the press” refers neither to the pieces of equipment and organisational structures that provide media platforms nor to the freedom of individual persons. It refers to the communicative transactions, and the opportunity for these transactions, between the platforms and their audiences. It is the freedom of those transactions and potential transactions that is protected. The institutional status of the press, and the material capabilities to operate as a media platform create a trusteeship in which the people are the trustees. That is not how media owners, on the whole, prefer it to be seen. They prefer it to be seen as their freedom to service their audiences in their own way, and in the Anglophone democracies this view has prevailed, so far. 25  Nerone, J. (1995) “Revisiting Four Theories of the Press – Theoretical Shortcomings” in Nerone, J. (ed) Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, pp. 15–17.

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In many democracies—and certainly in the three that are the focus of this book—media ownership is a mixture of public and private. While newspapers are invariably owned as private property, broadcasting has both private and public ownership. At the same time, the press is a democratic institution. Private ownership of a democratic institution requires that the democratic polity have a means of exerting accountability for the way private, as well as public, owners use their power and perform their institutional responsibilities. As discussed in Chap. 6, freedom of the press has both a positive and a negative dimension. The negative dimension— freedom of the press from restraint—has historically eclipsed the positive dimension—freedom for serving the public interest. Democratic Revival theory posits that these two dimensions should be regarded as co-equal, and mechanisms of accountability independent of the press should be established to see that the press is answerable for the use of its freedom in both dimensions. The justification for this rests on the right of democratic polities to hold to account the institutions that are relied upon to make the democracy work. If the principle of accountability is to be applied, some means of enforcing it and of applying it equally to all forms of delivery—print, broadcast and the internet—have to be found. Accepting that statutory accountability is regarded in the Anglophone democracies as an unacceptable burden on free speech, yet laissez-faire self-regulation has been shown to fail, a middle course suggests itself: statute-based selfregulation, as proposed by Leveson and described in Chap. 9. This would require a basic law requiring the news media to establish and operate an accountability mechanism satisfying certain general criteria concerning transparency, independence, resourcing, membership, enforcement procedures and sanctions. Such a system would encompass all news media platforms, including the global tech giants that carry news. An embryonic form of this idea was proposed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in its 2019 report on the impact of the global digital platforms on the provision of media services in the Australian market.26 It recommended a new platform-neutral regulatory framework covering media businesses, publishers, broadcasters and digital platforms. The 26  Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (2019) Digital Platforms Inquiry Final Report, https://www.accc.gov.au/publications/digital-platforms-inquiry-finalreport, accessed 10 January 2021.

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framework would set out the extent of regulation and what part, if any, self-regulation and co-regulation would play in making accountability stick. Whatever the ultimate design of this regulatory system, it would need to include what the Commission called “appropriate monitoring and enforcement mechanisms accompanied by meaningful sanctions”. By early 2021, the Australian government had not bitten on this particular bullet, although it was pursuing the implementation of another recommendation from the same ACCC report concerning the requirement that Facebook and Google pay Australian media organisations for the news content they had been taking for nothing, as referred to earlier. Whatever the fate of these moves in Australia, the fact remains that the media, as an institution of democratic governance, ought not to be less accountable for its use of power than are the other pillars of democracy: parliament, the executive government and the judiciary. For each of these there are formal mechanisms of accountability—of varying effectiveness, it is true. While broadcast news and current affairs is subject to statutory regulation—which is wrong in principle—newspapers are accountable to no one but themselves. Some newspapers have ombudsmen or readers’ editors to give complainants a voice, but their power and effectiveness varies widely and is anyway an internal process generally not subject to external review. The power of the Murdoch press in particular has perverted the power relationship between the fourth estate and the other three estates. Democratic theory requires that governments elected by the sovereign people have supreme power in democratic polities. Events described in this book have shown conclusively that in the US, Britain and Australia elected governments have been overborne by the intimidatory influence of the Murdoch organisation. Democratic Revival theory posits that this perversion must be corrected. That requires an acknowledgement by the press that its power should not be equal to or greater than that of the elected government. It also requires an assertion of governmental authority which in recent decades successive governments in these countries have not had the courage to make. This brings into sharp focus the central dilemma of how to exert meaningful accountability on the press without abridging its essential freedom. Leveson and Australia’s ACCC have provided blueprints. It is up to legislators to respond and for the press to play a responsible role in developing a way through.

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Democratic Revival Theory’s Fundamental Assumptions Democratic Revival theory, following the analytical framework of Four Theories, rests on assumptions about the nature of people, the nature of the state, the relationship between people and the state, and the nature of truth. Democratic Revival theory assumes that individual autonomy is inviolable, that the state exists to serve the individual, and that in the relationship between the nation and the individual, the individual takes primacy. It assumes that in a liberal democracy, each individual is entitled to certain inalienable freedoms, among which is freedom of expression. As to the nature of knowledge and truth, it rests on an ideal of journalistic truth that is evidence-based, impartial and contingent: it is the best version of events available at the time of publication but liable to change as the evidence changes. The principal objective of this truth is to give effect to the Lockean concept of the sovereign people by providing them with that bedrock of reliable information on which to base participation in political, economic and social life. However, the provision of shared information and opinions on which a common conversation may proceed is not to be confused with collective thought. Each individual is free to draw his or her own conclusions from the common conversation and make his or her personal contributions to it. The sovereign people live their collective lives in what Habermas called the public sphere. In the middle of the twentieth century, Habermas feared the immediacy of electronic media, lamenting the loss of what he saw as the time and space for reflectiveness possible with the printed word.27 Luke Goode saw in Habermas’s thesis regrettable effects of a citizenry bereft of space and time, combined with a reduction of the citizen to a ratings, box office or circulation statistic. These concerns found their echo in the professional mass media’s fixation on analytics and the consequent attraction of clickbait as a means of generating “eyeballs”. Goode referred to the “classic dilemma of balancing openness with the demands of mutual respect and care for the other incumbent on an egalitarian discourse ethic”.28 He later referred to Habermas’s distaste for the 27  Goode, L. (2005) Jurgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere, Pluto Press, London, pp. 22–23. 28  Ibid., p. 28.

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online world.29 Habermas has described it as a series of global villages that, far from contributing towards the emergence of a global public sphere, reflected and exacerbated the fragmentation of public life and the proliferation of cultural enclaves. James Bohman noted that fragmentation and cultural enclaves run counter to two social conditions that have long been widely identified as necessary to democratisation: the need for a rich associative life of civil society, and the need for a communicative infrastructure of the public sphere that permits the expression and diffusion of public opinion.30 He stated that digital technological phenomena had transformed the public sphere from a unitary forum to a distributive public of the type best exemplified in computer-mediated network forms of communication.31 He noted the importance of having communication in the public sphere that cut across social spheres. He pointed to the constructive possibilities offered by digital technology to further extend the public forum by providing a new unbounded space for communicative interaction, but went on to argue that at present there was a lack of congruity between existing political institutions and these expanded forms of communicative interaction.32 Democratic Revival theory recognises and promotes each of these ideals. The professional mass media, as an institution, needs to adjust to its existence alongside, and as part of, this new type of public sphere that encompasses social media as well as professional mass media. While the internet as a tool promotes a vibrant civil society and extends the public sphere, in order to transform the public sphere something more is needed: the use of the internet to create public spaces in which free, open and respectful dialogue occurs33 as part of an ongoing interaction between publics and democratic institutions.34

 Ibid., p. 106.  Bohman, J. (2007) Democracy across Borders: From Demos to Demoi, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p. 60. 31  Ibid., p. 63. 32  Ibid., pp. 70–73. 33  Ibid., pp. 80–81. 34  Dewey, J. (1941) The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, selected from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Washington, H. A. (ed), Cassell, London, pp. 255 and 314. 29 30

PART IV

Journalism and the Future of Democracy

CHAPTER 13

Conclusion

In May 2020, with the world in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic, Margaret MacMillan, an historian at the University of Toronto, wrote an essay in The Economist about the possibilities for life after the pandemic.1 On a scale of one to ten, where one was utter despair and ten was cautious hopefulness, it would have rated about six. Her thesis was that the future would be decided by a fundamental choice between reform and calamity. Calamity would ensue if the leaders of nation states continued to ignore the legitimate grievances of ordinary people, the growing economic inequality as demonstrated by the French economist Thomas Picketty, and what she called the “dark sides of our world”. These had been exposed by the pandemic: the fragility of international supply lines, the disadvantages of relying on offshore sources for critical goods, and the questions about the effectiveness of international bodies, of which the World Health Organisation was the obvious, though unnamed, exemplar. Reform would have to begin with trust, trust by the people in each other, in their political leaders and in their institutions. The pandemic had shown that countries where this trust was intact—she named South Korea, Denmark, Germany and New Zealand—had controlled the disease better than other countries, especially those where illiberal, populist demagogues were in power. She named Brazil, India and the United States. In the 1  MacMillan, M. (2020) “The Pandemic is a Turning Point in Our History”, The Economist, 9 May 2020, p71.

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countries where trust was high, leaders had been able to talk frankly to their citizens about the difficult road ahead. In the countries where demagogues had taken power, the appeal was to the people’s baser fears and fantasies. Echoing Bertrand Russell, she noted that people coming out of a disaster such as Covid-19 were open to sweeping changes. She used as examples Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal after the Great Depression of 1929–1932, and the re-ordering of economic priorities after World War Two according to the prescriptions of John Maynard Keynes. Would the British people, having suffered dreadfully in the pandemic, continue to accept an under-funded National Health Service? Would countries be prepared to invest more heavily in the World Health Organisation and give it greater power to protect the world from disease? Might economic forums such as the G7 and G20 become forums for unity rather than dissent? To that impressive list may be added another question: might the press be brave enough and honest enough to reflect on the contribution it had made to the creation of democracy’s crisis, and be prepared to change in order that it might help rebuild public trust in democratic institutions? This book has discussed what are considered to be at least some of the main ingredients of a reform programme for the press as an institution, and journalism as a profession, if this possibility is to be realised. That it could be part of a wider reform programme for Western democracies seemed possible as a new spirit of what might be called economic morality announced itself. This came from within the Republican Party of the United States even while that most amoral of Republican presidents, Donald Trump, was in office, and reasserted some of the fundamental values of conservatism. It took the form of a new organisation, American Compass, founded in May 2020 by Oren Cass, who was the domestic policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 US presidential election campaign, and the author of an acclaimed book on labour markets, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. From 2015 to 2019, he was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where his work on strengthening the labour market addressed issues ranging from the social safety net and environmental regulation to trade and immigration to education and trades unions. American Compass’s mission, as stated on its website, was to

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“restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity”.2 As the coronavirus pandemic wrought havoc across the United States on a scale unmatched at that time anywhere else in the world, Cass described the nation’s response as an indictment of what he called an “economic piety”—a form of ideological purity—that ignored many values that markets do not take into their calculations. These included the well-being of workers, the security of supply chains, and the running down of America’s self-sufficiency, exemplified by a shortage of medical supplies. His line of argument was supported by a senior Republican member of Congress, Senator Marco Rubio, in an article for The New York Times.3 His critique of the failure of American economic policy over two decades was crystallised in one sentence: Why didn’t we have enough N95 masks or ventilators on hand for a pandemic? Because buffer stocks don’t maximize financial return, and there was no shareholder reward for protecting against risk.

The off-shoring of manufacturing to cheap-labour countries, mainly China, had not only left America vulnerable but represented an ethos in which the common good was sacrificed to economic efficiency, what Rubio called a “hyperindividualistic ethos”, the moral bankruptcy of which had now been exposed. It was possible at the time to see this as further evidence of an attempt among genuine conservatives to reclaim conservatism. As a political philosophy it had been hijacked for the first two decades of the twenty-first century by a reactionary-populist hybrid or, as the (genuinely) conservative newspaper The Economist4 described it, reactionary nationalism, of which Trump was, par excellence, the exemplar. The same hybrid could be seen at work in Britain in the nationalistic vote to leave the European Union and in Australia where a reactionary rump of the governing Liberal-­ National Party coalition pursued a ruthless agenda against any meaningful action of climate change, paralysing policy and seriously destabilising parliamentary government.  https://americancompass.org/ accessed on 22 May 2020.  Rubio, M. (2020) “We Need a More Resilient American Economy”, The New  York Times, 20 April 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/opinion/marco-rubio-­ coronavirus-economy.html accessed 22 May 2020. 4  The Economist, 6 July 2019, “The Global Crisis in Conservatism”, pp9, 16–18. 2 3

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Things could go either way. Crises often induce panic in the population and sometimes this leads them to crave a strong leader who promises certainty in uncertain times. This was the impulse that had induced people to vote for Trump and, in Britain, for Boris Johnson. However, since the experience of the coronavirus pandemic in both those countries was catastrophic, it seemed at least an even-money bet that voters would reject more of their populist, reactionary nationalism. This hypothesis was borne out, at least in part, by the defeat of Trump in the 2020 presidential election. For that reason, among all the others already mentioned, 2020 did seem to represent a pivot point historically in intellectual fashion, with potentially far-reaching changes in the approach to economic and social policy across the democratic world. It promised a reprioritising of values and a new assessment of the importance of democratic institutions and the roles they were expected to play. The institution of the press was not immune from this shift. People had begun to realise that whatever benefits social media had brought society, the provision of trustworthy information and a civil forum in which to debate issues of common concern was not among them. A stark example of this realisation was the sharp rise in subscriptions to America’s most respected national newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal—in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election.5 The challenge for the future is whether the professional mass media can live up to the expectations created by the crisis-induced mood for change, which is one of the assumptions underpinning this book, and the thesis of Margaret MacMillan. It is romantic nonsense to expect all of the professional mass media would do so—significant elements of it have never done so—but those with a commitment to making a conscientious effort to play their institutional role might well be encouraged to tr y. In 2020, the window of opportunity was open. There appeared to be an appetite for change in the major contours of democratic life, stimulated by a recognition that after 40 years the economic paradigm of neoliberalism had run its course, and sharpened by the experience of Covid-19. 5  https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/29/new-york-times-subscriptions-soar-tenfoldafter-donald-trump-wins-presidency.html accessed 23 May 2020.

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Would the professional mass media seize it? The normative requirements set down in the Democratic Revival theory of the press described in Chap. 12 proposed a means by which they might do so. The crisis in democracy, 40 years in the making, will not be resolved quickly, but the events of the period 2016–2020 have opened a window through which a vision of a better future may be glimpsed. If Margaret MacMillan is right, and the world really is at a point where significant economic, political and social change is possible, might the professional mass media be brave enough and honest enough to reflect on the contribution it made to the creation of democracy’s crisis, and be prepared to change in order to help rebuild it? Because if a democratic revival is to occur, strong media will be an essential part of it.

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #AllLivesMatter, 137, 167 #BlackLivesMatter, 95, 137, 167 #MeToo, 145 A Abbott, Tony, 32, 44 ABC News (US), 30, 108 Aboriginal people, 86 Accountability of media, 125, 133, 143, 166, 177, 180 Adams, John, 118 Affordable Care Act, 14 Afghanistan, 18, 95 Afghan War Logs, 134 Africa, 18 The Age, 48, 108, 171 Agranat, Simon, 61 Albanese, Anthony, 127 Algorithms, 73, 74, 136, 138, 140

Ali, Waleed, 93 Al-Qaeda, 18, 44, 89 “Alternative facts”, 63, 169 Amazon, 140 American Compass, 188 Anglicanism, 56 Apple, 140, 162 Arendt, Hannah, 62 Areopagitica, 77, 78, 116 Assange, Julian, 134 Assassin’s veto, 8, 45, 59, 88–90, 96 Associated Press, 153, 177 Australia, vii, 11, 16, 18, 22–24, 32, 33, 39–41, 44, 54, 69, 83, 84n20, 86–88, 104, 106, 118–121, 123, 125–127, 137, 141, 144–146, 176, 177, 181, 189 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 106, 106n12, 121, 175

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Muller, Journalism and the Future of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7

203

204 

INDEX

Australian Communication and Media Authority, 176 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), 146, 180 Australian Press Council, 125 Authoritarian theory of the press, 150 B Baker, Edwin C., 132, 153, 155, 156 Balance, 4, 7, 14, 21, 27, 101, 103, 107, 108, 123, 170 Barendt, Eric, 78, 81 Barriers to digital communication, 147 Beard, Charles, 6 Bell, Emily, 133 Bennet, James, 94 Berlin, Isaiah, 5, 28, 45–47, 95 “Common moral horizon”, 47 The Hedgehog and the Fox, 45 Incommensurables, 46 Berlin Wall, 16, 40 Biden, Joe, v Bill of Rights (UK), 88, 102, 118 Bill of Rights (US), 20, 118 Birstill, 31 Blake, William, 106 Bohman, 183 Bok, Sissela, 69 Bolt, Andrew, 86, 87 Book-burning, 116 Bourbon monarchy, 40 Brandeis University, 89 Bretton Woods agreements, 3 Brexit referendum, 13, 20, 59, 171 Britain, vi, 9, 11, 16, 18, 20, 24, 31–33, 39–41, 43, 58, 69, 104, 118, 121, 123–125, 127, 137, 141, 176, 177, 181, 189, 190 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 21, 30, 121 British Columbia University, 100

British Independent Press Standards Organisation, 47 Broadcasting financing, 121 ownership, 180 Pinkoes and Traitors, 121 public-sector; Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 106, 121, 175; British Broadcasting Corporation, 121; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 121; Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 122; National Public Radio, 122; Public Broadcasting Service, 122; Radio New Zealand, 121; Special Broadcasting Service, 121 Regulation; Scandinavia, 175 Burke, Edmund, 13, 117 Bush, George W., 44, 54, 130, 141, 142 C Cable, Vince, 124 Cambridge Analytica, 22 Cameron, David, 33, 124 Canada, vii, 16, 18, 23, 104, 121, 123, 139 Cancel culture, 93, 94 Capital in the Twenty-first Century, 17 Capote, Truman, 105 The Cartoons that Shook the World, 89 Cass, Oren, 22, 136, 137, 188, 189 CBS News, 30 Censorship, vii, 79, 91, 116, 117, 166, 167 Charbonnier, Stephane, 88, 89 Charles II, 101 Charles IX, 53 Charlie Hebdo, 44, 88, 89

 INDEX 

Charlottesville, 48, 110, 137 Chicago School, 15, 39 China, 16, 21, 162, 189 Chomsky, Noam, 111, 158, 159, 168 Christchurch, 45, 53, 168 Christians, Clifford, 54, 55, 88, 157, 158, 166 Churchill, Winston, vi Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order, 54 “Clear and present danger” test, 10, 85, 86 Cliffe, Lionel, 68 Climate change Abbott, Tony, 32, 44 Murdoch, Rupert, 32, 127 Sky News Australia, 32 Clinton, Hillary, 29 CNBC, 30 Cologne, 31 Columbia Journalism Review, 110 Columbia University, 110 Commission on the Freedom of the Press, viii, 4, 104 Communism, vi, 39, 150, 157 Complex democracies, 156 Confucianism, 179 Confucius, 161 Cooke, Alistair, 20–21, 126 Coronavirus, 14, 23, 24, 83, 105, 109, 145, 147, 189, 190 Correspondence theory of truth, 70 Counterspeech, 59, 71, 72 COVID-19, v, vi, 14, 126, 127, 144, 187, 188, 190 Cox, Jo, 31 Crisis in democracy, 7, 9, 14, 19, 30, 33, 138, 191 Cruz, Ted, 22 Curran, James, 130, 131

205

D “Daily Me”, 135, 166 Danish cartoons, 44, 45, 89, 96 Davidson, Donald, 63, 64 Davies, Harry, 22 Davies, Nick, 123, 124 Declaration of Independence, 13, 19, 41, 151 Defoe, Daniel, 100 Democracy COVID-19 effects, vi Democracy Under Lockdown report, 23 trust, 23, 25, 32, 188 Democratic-participant theory of the press, 157, 158, 165 Democratic Republic of the Congo, vi Democratic Revival theory of the press, 147, 191 Democrats, v, 10–12, 20, 28, 29 Der Spiegel, 134 Development Media theory of the press, 157 Dog-whistling, 66, 94 “Dollarocracy”, 10 Duelfer Report, 141, 142 Dummett, Michael, 65 E Eatock, Pat, 86, 87 Echo chambers, 8, 22, 136, 137, 141, 142, 165, 170, 172 The Economist, 140, 187, 189 Edelman Trust Index/ Barometer, 23, 135 Edict of Fontainebleau, 55 Editorial independence, 166, 170, 171 Electoral College, 29 Emotional interpretation function of the press, 152 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 4

206 

INDEX

English Revolution, vii, 102, 116, 117 Enlightenment principles, 71 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 69 Ethical Space, 8 Europe, vii, 17, 18, 20, 25, 31, 40, 54, 55, 74, 115, 121 European Union, vi, 9, 30, 44, 189 F Facebook Algorithm, 74, 136, 138 Cambridge Analytica, 22 launch, 21 News Feed, 21, 136, 176 Oversight Board, 141 Paying for news, 25 switches off Australian news feed, 176 users, 22, 136, 140 “Fake news”, 70, 167, 169, 174 Farage, Nigel, 30–33, 43, 171 Fascism, vi, 21, 74 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Blue Book, 153 Fairness Doctrine, 122; Requirements, 122 Female genital mutilation (FGM), 43 Filter bubble(s), 136, 141, 142, 147 Finkelstein, Ray, 177 First Amendment, vii, 20, 85, 118, 122, 178 First Crusade, 54 Floating, 4 Floyd, George, 24, 96, 105, 132, 172, 173 Floyd, Julie, 63 Folau, Israel, 87 Four Theories of the Press, 149 Fourth estate, 42, 48, 49, 62, 117, 125, 152, 156, 181

Fox News, 11n3, 30, 33, 58 and Donald Trump, 30 A Free and Responsible Press, 104, 152–153 Freedom from and freedom for, 5, 178 Freedom House, 23, 144 Freedom of the press, vii, 5, 6, 8, 20, 42, 83, 102, 123, 149, 177–180 Freedom of the Press: A Framework of Principle, 104, 153 Free speech Mill and its limits, 78, 80, 81, 85, 94 Positive and negative freedom, 95 Schenck case, 85 voltaire and its limits, 77, 78, 94 Frege, Gottlob, 63, 64 French Revolution, 40, 42, 74, 151 Fukuyama, Francis, 16 G Gallagher, Ryan, 167 Gatekeeping, 90–92, 134, 167, 168 “Gates”, Mr, 90, 91 German Democratic Republic, vi Girard, Rene, 34–37 The Scapegoat, 34 Global Financial Crisis, 14, 17, 31, 53, 58 Globalisation, 31, 43, 48, 53, 54 Global platforms and paying for news, 145, 146 Goode, Luke, 182 Google, 130, 136, 139, 140, 146, 176, 181 as secondary publisher, 139 Gow, Ian, 31 Grayling, A. C., 13, 47, 49, 56, 57, 65 attributes of birth and of choice, 47, 49, 56, 57 “recognitional capacity” of meaning, 65

 INDEX 

Great Depression, 54, 188 “Great Replacement” theory, 53 Grice, Paul, 66 Guantanamo Bay, 41 The Guardian Cambridge Analytica, 22 compares UKIP Brexit poster to Nazi propaganda poster, 30 Mair, Thomas Alexander, profile, 31 “Guided market system”, 159 Gunaratne, Shelton, 163 H Habermas pragmatic epistemological realism, 65 public sphere, 81, 182, 183 Hacking of phones, 124 Hall, Evelyn Beatrice, 78 Hamilton, Alexander, 118 Harper’s magazine, 93 Harvard University, 4 Hate speech, 8, 22, 33, 34, 40, 43, 82, 88, 92, 96, 97, 132, 141, 168 Hearst, William Randolph, 5, 104, 152 Henry VII, 115 Henry VIII, 115 Herald & Weekly Times Ltd, 86, 87, 126 Herald Sun, 86, 108 Herman, Edward, 158, 159, 168 Hess, Amanda, 144 Hobbes, Thomas, 19, 42, 62, 84, 179 Hocking, William Ernest, viii, 5–7, 104, 153, 154 Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell, 85, 86, 92 Hong Kong, 162 Howard, John, 66

207

Humanocentric theory of the press, 163 Huntington, Samuel P., 44, 54, 55 Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order, 44 Hussein, Saddam, 18, 141 Hutchins Commission, 104, 152, 153, 178 Hybrid journalism, 171 I Impartiality empiricism, 108 enlightenment spirit, 101 “inherited shibboleth”, 110 standards of proof, 101 Impeachment, 10 Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation, 126 Index of Forbidden Books, 82 India, 16, 187 Inequality, vi, 3, 14, 15, 17, 28, 54, 74, 187 Institutional forbearance, 12 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 18 International Monetary Fund, 3 Iran, 68 Iraq, 18, 68, 69, 95, 134, 141, 142 Islam, 18, 44, 45, 48, 53–55, 58, 89 It Can’t Happen Here, 20 Iverson, John, 78 J Jefferson, Thomas, 41, 118, 152 “Je suis Charlie”, 45 Jiafei Yin, 161 Johnson, Boris, 190 Johnson, E. W., 105

208 

INDEX

Jones, Alan, 143 Journalism function in democracies, viii newspaperdeathwatch website, 23 positive and negative duty, 68 power to portray, 34 Public Interest Journalism Initiative, 145 truth in, 61, 63, 68, 69, 100, 109 Justice Department, 29, 138 Jyllands Posten, 44, 88, 89 K Kant, Immanuel, 47 Kaufman, Bruce, 15 Kenyon, Andrew, 95, 96 Keynes, John Maynard, 15, 188 Keynesian economics, vii Kipling, Rudyard, 155 Klausen, Jytte, 89 Knight, J. S., 104 L The Lancet, 72 Leibling, A. J., 177 Letter Concerning Toleration, 55 Leveson, Lord (Brian), 124, 125, 176, 177, 180, 181 inquiry report, 124, 125, 176, 177 Leviathan, 19 Levitsky, Steven, 12, 167 Lewis, Sinclair, 20, 21 Liberal democracy, vii, viii, 16, 27, 28, 32, 40, 49, 182 Liberalism, viii, 7, 15, 32, 39–49, 157, 179 Libertarian theory of the press, 152 Licensing of the press Court of Star Chamber, 116 effective ending, 117

establishment, 123 Licensing Order, 116 Limborch, Philipp van, 55 Lippmann, Walter, 37 Locke, John, 19, 20, 41, 55–58, 62, 67, 94, 119, 151, 161, 179 Letter Concerning Toleration, 55 London Gazette, 102 The Los Angeles Times, 190 Louis XIV, 55 Luce, Henry, 104, 152 Lying, 10, 64, 67, 69, 71, 72, 81, 92, 147 M Machiavelli, 67–69 The Prince, 67 MacMillan, Margaret, 187, 190, 191 Mair, Thomas Alexander, 31 Manchester Guardian, 103 Martin, Gregory, 167, 171 Maxwell, Robert, 171 McChesney, Robert, 10, 131, 156 McComiskey, Bruce, 109 McQuail, Denis, 157, 165, 170 Meaning communication-intention theory of, 66 construction of, 64 utterer’s, 66, 75 Media accountability, 8, 123, 125, 133, 166, 177, 180 concentration, 104, 155, 156 employment, 23 ownership, 104, 155–157, 179 polarisation, 11, 167 trust, 23, 25, 126, 135, 150, 174 Mencken, H. L., 44 “Merit goods”, 178 Middle East, 18, 43

 INDEX 

Miliband, Ed, 124 Mill, John Stuart, 71, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 92, 94, 179 free-speech argument from truth, 79–80 Milton, John, 71, 77–79, 81, 86, 100, 116, 151 Minneapolis, 24, 105, 132 Montaigne, Michel de, 73 Morrison, Scott, 127, 146, 176 MSNBC, 30, 33 Mueller, Robert, 29, 138 Muhammed, the Prophet, 89 Mulgan, Robert, 155 Murdoch, Rupert, 11, 32, 33, 40, 87, 123–127, 131, 171, 181 Muslims, 18, 31, 44, 45, 48, 53, 54, 58, 88, 168 “Mutualisation”, 133, 174 N Napoli, Philip, 73 National security, 41, 83, 84, 141 Nazism, vi, 74 NBC, 30, 153 Negroponte, Nicholas, 135 Neoclassical economics, 39 New Deal, 188 New journalism, 105 News Corporation, 11, 32, 40, 87, 106, 125, 171 News councils (US), 125 News of the World, 124 News International, 123, 124 New York, 5, 18, 44, 69, 83, 152 The New York Times, 48, 49, 94, 110, 134, 146, 189, 190 New Zealand, vii, 16, 45, 53, 121, 123, 168, 187 Nichols, John, 10 Nixon, Richard, 68, 71, 122

209

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 21 Norway terrorism attack, 53 O Obama, Barack, 14 Objectivity, 99, 100, 108–111 Occupy movement, 18 Ofcom, 108, 176 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 17 P Pandemic, v, 14, 23, 24, 83, 105, 109, 126, 144, 145, 187–190 Pappas, Takis, 27, 28 Partisanship, 11, 19, 20, 165, 169 Penn, William, 57 Peterson, Theodore, 149 Pew Foundation, 12 Pew Research Center, vii, 23, 73, 144 Picketty, Thomas, 17, 187 Pluralism, 7, 27, 39–49, 95, 96, 166, 170 Polarisation, 8, 11, 12, 14, 19, 22, 111, 137, 140, 167, 168, 171 Popper, Karl, 57, 58 Populism, 7, 8, 11, 13, 27–38, 53, 74, 168 Port of Melbourne Authority, 107 Poynter Institute, 142 Pragmatic objectivity, 100, 108 President of the United States, vi, 9, 44, 92 Press licensing Court of Star Chamber, 116 effective ending, 117 establishment, 118, 123 Licensing Order, 116

210 

INDEX

Press theory, see Theories of the press The Prince, 67 Privacy, 22, 91, 124, 125, 141, 143, 174 Professional mass media, 8, 11, 22, 25, 95, 115–127, 132–135, 142, 143, 145–147, 163, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172–176, 182, 183, 190, 191 Propaganda model of the press, 158 Provisional Irish Republican Army, 31 Pulitzer, Joseph, 5, 152 R Racial discrimination, 86 Racial Discrimination Act, 86–87 Rather, Dan, 130 Reactionaryism, 40 Reagan, Ronald, 16, 39 Red tops, 5 Relativism, 42, 47, 57 Religious freedom, 86–88, 101 Reporters Without Borders, 24 Republican Party, 10, 188 Revolutionary theory of the press, 150 Richards, Justice Melinda, 139, 140 Ricketson, Matthew, 177 “Right to Know” campaign, 83 Romney, Mitt, 188 Rosenfeld, Sophia, 70, 71, 74 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 12, 19, 62, 162, 179 Royal Society, 101 Rubio, Marco, 189 Rudd, Kevin, 127 Rugby Australia, 87, 88 Rusbridger, Alan, 133, 134, 141, 174 Russell, Bertrand, 4, 188 Russia Internet Research Agency, 138 2016 US election interference, 138, 140

S Saddam Hussein, 18 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, 54, 55 Scapegoating, 7, 27–38, 53, 74, 170 Schenck case, 85 Schlesinger, Arthur M., 4 Schramm, Wilbur, 149, 151 Schudson, Michael, 62 Schwager, Raymond, 36 Scott, C. P., 103, 104 Seaton, Jean, 121 Second Treatise of Government, 41, 57, 151, 161 Separation of church and state, 55–57 September 11 attacks, 18 Sessions, Jeff, 29 Shah, Hemant, 158 Siebert, Fred, 149, 150, 165 Silverman, Craig, 142 Sky News Australia, 32 climate change, 32 Smith, Adam, 151 Social contract, 19, 57, 62, 75, 94 Social media effect on journalists’ employment, 93, 144 effect on press operations, 130, 138, 143 George Floyd killing, 24, 96, 132, 172 power, 21, 24, 44, 90, 91, 129, 132, 146, 166 S230 Telecommunications Act (US), 139 Social responsibility theory of the press, viii, 104, 154 Sophisticated Modernism, 62 Sovereign people, 19, 20, 41, 94, 119, 151, 173, 181, 182 Soviet Union, 16, 71 collapse, 16

 INDEX 

Spanish-American war, 5 Spinoza, Benedict, 19, 84–86 Stiglitz, Joseph, 14, 15 “Stop the Steal” campaign, 10 Sunstein, Cass, 22, 136, 137 Supreme Court (US), 85, 86, 177 Supreme Court of Victoria, 139 The Sydney Herald, 119 The Sydney Morning Herald, 71, 106, 119 T Tarrant, Brenton, 45 Tea Party movement, 40 Telephone hacking, 123, 124 Television networks, 10, 30, 49, 130, 146 Terrorism July 7 2005 attacks on London, 44 September 11, 2001 attacks, 18, 44, 53, 54, 69, 83 2017 and 2018 attacks in London, 44 Thatcher, Denis, 121 Thatcher, Margaret, 15, 33, 39, 121 Theories of the press Asian values, 160 Authoritarian, 71, 150 communication technology determinism, 160 Democratic-Participant, 40, 157, 158, 165 Democratic Revival, 7, 8, 40, 147, 165–183, 191 Development Media, 157 Libertarian, 71, 150–152, 154, 157, 160, 161, 165 Revolutionary, 150 Social Responsibility, viii, 4, 7, 40, 104, 150, 153–155, 160, 165, 166, 178

211

Thirty Years War, 55 Time magazine, 104, 152 Tocqueville, Alexis, 20 Tolerance, toleration, viii, 8, 12, 42, 47, 48, 53–59, 78, 93, 166 Townsend Plan, 91 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 84 Treaty of Versailles, 74 Trolling, 144 Trump, Donald, v, vi, 9–11, 13, 14, 20–22, 29–33, 43, 48, 49, 58, 63, 72, 92, 94, 110, 111, 126, 127, 141, 146, 147, 167, 171, 173, 174, 188–190 “Alternative facts”, 63, 169 “Drain the swamp”, 32 “Fake news media”, 29 Attacks Twitter, 10 Capitol insurrection, 10 Charlottesville, 48, 110 COVID-19, v, vi, 14, 126, 127 effect of election, 9 media as “enemy of the people”, 30 populism, 29, 30 second impeachment, 10 social media block, 10 social media use, 173 TV networks cut-away, 10 The Washington Post fact-­checking, 21 Trust levels Edelman Trust Index, 23 Truth as a constituent element in all press theories, 71 correspondence theory of, 63, 70 empiricism, 65, 108 Frege’s norm, 63 imperfectability, 101 intentionality, 64 journalistic, 61–75, 182

212 

INDEX

Truth (cont.) “pragmatic epistemological realism”, 65 “recognitional capacity”, 65 rhetorical theory of social truth, 108 Turnbull, Malcolm, 127 Tweet, 29, 92, 141, 143, 173 Twitter blocks Donald Trump, 10 fact-checks Donald Trump, 21, 92 launch, 21 use by Donald Trump, 141 U Umpire function of the press, 7 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), 30, 59, 171 United Nations, 3, 18, 47 United States (US), v–viii, 5, 9–11, 11n3, 14, 16–24, 29, 33, 39–41, 43, 44, 48, 49, 53–55, 58, 68, 69, 85, 90, 92, 94–96, 104, 111, 118, 119, 121–123, 125, 127, 130, 134, 137–141, 146, 151, 153, 154, 176, 177, 181, 187–189 United States Commission on the Freedom of the Press, viii, 4 United States Constitution, 118 United States Supreme Court, 85, 86, 177 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 47 University of North Carolina, 23 Utilitarianism, 62, 75

V Vaccination, 72 Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 138, 140 Anti-Social Media, 138 Verification, 72, 75, 130, 132, 134, 142, 166, 169, 172, 174 Verification Handbook, 142 Vietnam War, 68, 85 Virality, 145, 173, 174 Voltaire, 77, 78, 86, 94–97 W Waisbord, Silvio, 172 Wall Street, 17 The Wall Street Journal, 110, 190 War Logs, 134 War on Terror, 41 Ward, Stephen, 100, 102, 108, 109 pragmatic objectivity, 100, 108 rhetorical theory of social truth, 108 Washington, 10, 18, 32, 44, 69, 83, 92, 127 The Washington Post fact-checking Donald Trump, 21 “The norms have broken down”, 133 as target of attack by Donald Trump, 30 Watergate, 68 The Wealth of Nations, 151 Weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 18, 69, 141, 142 Westergaard, Kurt, 44, 89 Western Europe, 18 White supremacy Brenton Tarrant, 45 Charlottesville, 48, 137 Christchurch massacre, 45

 INDEX 

Wikileaks, 134, 174 William III and Mary of Orange, 102 Williams, James, 35 Wolfe, Alan, 40, 41 Wolfe, Tom, 105 World Bank, 3 World Health Organisation, 43, 187, 188 World War Two, v, 3, 5, 32, 39, 123, 154, 188

213

Y Yale University Press, 89 The Yellow Kid, 5 Yellow press, 4 Yurukoglu, A., 167, 171 Z Ziblatt, Daniel, 12, 167 Zuckerberg, Mark, 22, 139, 140 Appears before Congress, 22, 139