‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ is the slogan of the daily newspaper The Washington Post. The phrase originates from Bob Woodward, who, together with Carl Bernstein, published the investigation that led to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Nixon in 1972. Without the relentless work the two young journalists did to shed light on the affair (and the courage of their publisher Katherine Graham), American democracy would have remained in the dark about its president’s machinations. That’s why the slogan of the Swiss online newspaper Republik makes sense, too: ‘Without journalism, there is no democracy.’ In his new book Das Prinzip Trotzdem, Roger de Weck also describes journalism as the ‘infrastructure of democracy’.
Democracy needs media journalism
But journalism is not an art in a vacuum. There is no journalism without the media. In a very practical sense, this means that journalism, whether text, sound, image or video, needs an intermediary, or a carrier. This is the meaning of ‘medium’ in the narrower sense of the word: the ‘intermediary’ between sender and recipient. The problem for democracy is that this ‘intermediary’ is anything but neutral: media outlets are subject to economic conditions that have a much stronger influence on content and thus on journalism than many journalists are aware of.
Just how strongly economic interests can influence a newspaper was demonstrated by The Washington Post: the paper did not endorse a candidate in this year’s US presidential election for the first time in almost 50 years. This is despite the fact that Washington Post journalists had repeatedly stressed that they considered Donald Trump absolutely unsuitable and that it is the usual journalistic practice in the United States to endorse a candidate before elections. The refusal to endorse Kamala Harris as expected is not a return to journalistic independence, but rather stems from the economic caution of the Washington Post’s owner: Jeff Bezos probably wanted to prevent himself and his companies, the online retailer Amazon and the aerospace company Blue Origin, from coming into a potential President Trump’s line of fire. After all, he is notorious for holding a grudge.
This small example shows how important it is to be aware of who owns various media outlets and of their interests. A vibrant democracy therefore needs journalism that is willing to turn the spotlight on itself: democracy needs media journalism.
Media journalism is particularly necessary when the media is under brutal economic pressure. The internet has destroyed the media’s business model. Until a few years ago, about two-thirds of most media were funded through advertising. Today, more than one in every two francs spent on advertising in Switzerland goes to Google and Facebook (Meta Platforms, Inc.). The big tech networks use artificial intelligence and vast databases to ensure that their customers’ advertising is laser-targeted to the screens of its intended audience. Traditional media end up virtually empty-handed.
The battle for users’ attention
The journalistic media are trying to keep up in the battle for users’ attention. But if you want to attract attention on the internet, you have to stand out to an extreme extent. You have to startle users with ever more urgent headlines. This has a huge impact on the content: its relevance no longer matters – it’s the click factor that counts. The content can no longer keep up with the urgency with which the headline is formulated. But if you make more and more noise about nothing, you won’t win users, you’ll lose them. The paradoxical consequence of attention-based journalism is therefore the loss of attention.
Critical media journalism exposes these mechanisms. And it ensures that the people who do good journalism get a platform. In addition to the economic conditions that shape and influence journalism more than it would like, this is the second important point that media journalism achieves. Journalism is not a soulless spotlight, neither mechanical nor as an infrastructure of democracy. Journalism is always the result of passionate work done by people. Taking care of them is media journalism’s second task.
