ZEIT ONLINE supports this year’s World News Day, organized by The World News Association (WAN-IFRA), a global network of 3,000 news publishing companies. On this occasion, we have asked Rasmus Kleis Nielsen to reflect on the current threats against journalism. He is Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, a post he will leave at the month to join the University of Copenhagen as a Professor in the Department of Communications. Read the German version of his article here.
Today is World News Day, a global initiative to draw public attention to the role that journalists play in providing trustworthy news and information that serves citizens and democracy.
It is a good day to underline that the biggest threats to that role are political, and that the best and last line of defence against these threats is public support for independent journalism.
Prominent politicians across the world are directly attacking inconvenient journalists with threats, lawsuits, or worse. They pressure platform companies to remove their work. They belittle and vilify individual reporters when it suits them, often singling out women and minorities. They encourage their supporters to distrust the news, and sometimes incite them to attack journalists.
While depressing, we should not be surprised that this is so.
At its best, independent journalism seeks to hold power to account. When have people in positions of power last liked being held to account? Independent journalists and those in power are not natural friends. They are arguably not meant to be friends. When some journalists sidle up to them, their colleagues, often rightly, criticize the results as toothless access journalism. When politicians in some cases in the past humoured journalists, it was not out of kindness. It was because they needed them to reach a wide audience. As news media diminish in reach and fewer people trust them, and a growing number of digital media channels and other forms of campaign communication mean politicians and other powerful people no longer need them to the same extent, they are no longer so solicitous.
At their worst, political threats to journalism across the world are often part of wider, systematic, sustained efforts to weaken, undermine, or even dismantle the formal and informal institutions of democracy. We live in a democratic recession and, as my Oxford colleague Nancy Bermeo has pointed out, it is often driven by what political scientists call „executive aggrandizement“, where governments, after taking power by broadly speaking democratic means, start chipping away at all forms of meaningful accountability, often focusing first on the civil service, regulators, the courts, and the news media, while continuing to hold elections to maintain a veneer of democratic legitimacy.
But even in countries where the formal and informal institutions of democracy remain robust, while leaders like to give speeches about the importance of free media, paying attention to what they do rather than what they say suggest there is little substantial political support for independent journalism.
At home, prominent politicians in liberal democracies give fewer interviews to reporters (and more to podcasters and influencers). They take few, if any, questions at press conferences and other staged events, and leave it to various underlings to handle their public relations. They enthusiastically embrace social media and digital advertising as ways to circumvent editorial gatekeepers. And in countries where public service media and subsidies for private publishers exist, politicians have often cut their funding in recent years.
Abroad, while European and American politicians criticize media repression by geopolitical rivals like China and Russia, they are supremely pragmatic in their dealings with many other political peers who aggressively seek to control the media and silence independent journalists. They do deals with autocrats among fellow EU and NATO leaders, curry favour with the despots ruling fossil fuel states in the Gulf, and jockey for position with the would-be strongman rulers of rising powers.
Donald Trump and other self-styled populists in democratic countries, and Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin among the autocrats, are easy to identify as enemies of independent journalism, because they are so blatant. Even as their overt attacks are especially worrying, we should also take time to recognize those who stand by and do little or nothing as the threats to independent journalism multiply – many powerful political leaders of a more moderate persuasion, from Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron to Angela Merkel, have happily given speeches about media freedom now and then, but in their time in power made few tangible commitments to protect and enable it.
ZEIT ONLINE supports this year’s World News Day, organized by The World News Association (WAN-IFRA), a global network of 3,000 news publishing companies. On this occasion, we have asked Rasmus Kleis Nielsen to reflect on the current threats against journalism. He is Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, a post he will leave at the month to join the University of Copenhagen as a Professor in the Department of Communications. Read the German version of his article here.