Is there such a thing is a free press?
The beautiful idea of the free press that reproduces life and keeps an eye on agencies of all levels as well as the public moods and tendencies, was something that brought me to the doors of the faculty of journalism for the first time. I was 16 then and came to apply for pre-undergrad courses.
Those pre-courses already put the first dints into that image, adding realistic details to the picture my imagination painted. Thus, I realized the scale of media dependency. The further life experience just added bits and pieces of the possible types of control over media.
In this column, I wanted to talk about the two more widespread types of dependency. The first one, the government control, showed me its face pretty quickly and wasn’t too shocking since I heard a lot about propaganda in school.
Besides, throughout history affiliation between the media and a government or ruling elites was a good tradition. The first newspapers read aloud on the squares of old European cities were used to deliver information from top to bottom. Later they became loudspeakers for the powerholders and also manipulative tools. I guess it was just one of the development stages, which is already in the past in some countries and for some media outlets, and not so much for others.
In general, I understand a need for a media covering government activities focusing on achievements rather than failures, but when it is as widespread as it is in the old country, not only does it become really dangerous for the society, but it is also often quite comical.
I’ll give you one example I personally came across back in Russia.
It was almost 10 years ago, when one of the first people in St. Petersburg, which is the second biggest city in the country, used a funny-sounding word in their speech. From that moment most bureaucrats started using this word, which at that time definitely sounded wrong, and media was after the government’s illiteracy as well as bureaucratic urge to mimic the bosses. (Remark, a few years later scientists decided it was a linguistic norm. Not sure if it always was a fine word to use that nobody knew about, or it developed its “normal” status through those years). But after a couple of weeks of endless jokes around susceptible illiteracy, most editors in Petersburg received an email, “kindly” recommending them to stop it. We laughed at the email, but as sad as it is, we stopped, as a lot of roads were going through the government and there wasn’t much room for wiggling in those relationships. (Now it seems that there is completely no room for any different opinion and all media sounds almost the same and quite often ridiculous).
But like I said, government control was nothing new, the real power of it was somewhat of a shock. But I still wanted to believe in free press, and it seemed it existed in the Western World, where democracy was supposed to be a warrant of freedom of speech and thus freedom of the press. However, quite soon I realized that the West has its own hellhound – open market (on top of possible government affiliation for some media).
Today media is business (did you know that according to CEOWORLD magazine’s Canada Rich List Index For 2019 Canada’s wealthiest person, David Thompson, is a hereditary peer and media magnate?) So like any other business, media is ruled by demand and those who pay directly or not may affect the content.
A few years ago I met Carl Bernstein, who was one of the two reporters to uncover the Watergate break-in, and whose reporting led to indictments of 40 administration officials and the eventual resignation of President Nixon. He participated in the investigative journalism conference in Winnipeg, attended by a lot of the first-grade Canadian reporters. And he actually put a shame on frontline reporters for lack of guts and the swamp they turned the media into, and that was a bigger shock for me.
There are always things that are happening behind the scenes that shouldn’t be happening. There was a time when democratic ideas actually worked, but nowadays I often feel that for most outlets it would be stupid to bite the hand that feeds you. So we play according to the same rules as everybody else.
Are the journalists to be blamed for that? Probably to a point: we still have to have the courage to fulfil our obligations. But I feel that more likely the trap we are in is just a side effect of the consumption system we built and where everything is for sale.
