2023-08-19 21:57:03
They are not just bad apples or isolated events. Journalism suffers a breakdown in too many places. This profession often forgets that what it has in its hands – information – is not a mere commodity, but a fundamental right, a basic pillar of free and democratic societies; that their main task is to be aware of the gigantic social responsibility that implies choosing what news is disseminated and how that information is focused. This task requires enormous doses of ethics, commitment, and a sense of duty.
However, we observe daily how formats proliferate that grant the same credibility to the truth and to lies, that place arguments for and against human rights on the same level, and that grant privileged spaces to dehumanizing and far-right discourses. Nothing of the last decade can be understood without the role that this type of journalism has played.
A misinformed society is easily manipulated. Those who abuse their privileges to misrepresent, falsify or practice that harmful equidistance know it well. They are subjects who despise the democratic concept of journalism and who feel intoxicated by the idea of acting as an elite that guides and shapes us, that influences and builds consensus by exalting artificial debates and burying urgent current issues.
The journalism of offices and red carpets has a crick in the neck from looking up so much while forgetting the stubborn reality that exists outside its bubble. He considers the receiving mass as a bewildered herd (Walter Lippmann ‘dixit’), ductile and malleable that takes the paths indicated to it. He aspires to protect the masses with a power similar to that sustained by the Church in the Middle Ages. And often it does.
In our country there are guys who say they practice journalism and who boast that the presidents of the Government pass while they remain in their management positions, setting guidelines with more power than those who are elected at the polls. Journalistic power without ethics and without a democratic culture generates delusions of grandeur and normalizes voracious psychopathies. Those who abuse their batons and get excited by them consider those who fight for decent journalism, those who do not use privileged channels to entangle, manipulate and enrich themselves dishonestly, to be imbeciles.
Given this, the challenge before us is urgent. We must demand more self-criticism in the profession and stop fearing – or even admiring – mercenary journalism. As Primo Levi wrote, “we always have the power to deny our consent”, to avoid participating in dynamics that damage coexistence and democracy. It is possible to broaden the gaze, defend decency, point out injustice, claim the right word, preserve the truth.
The meaning of journalism is to denounce abuses of power, not to indulge in them. Like Prometheus, our raison d’être as journalists is to steal fire from the gods to hand it over to humans, risking punishment from Zeus. We are not here to satisfy the lords of Olympus.
This article is part of the magazine ‘Ten stories of a decade’, exclusively for members of elDiario.es. Receive at home one of the last one-year gift-wrapped copies of elDiario.es
#Protect #fire #Prometheus