The undermining of journalism – the process that has divested it of the power and role acquired since the Enlightenment – is almost always explained by factors stemming from the new media landscape and the economic constraints to which the press is subjected. This new situation has especially punished (and sometimes even abolished) some journalism genres: news reporting, cultural journalism, features and investigation. Modern journalism, which was born with the Enlightenment and prompted Hegel to say that reading the newspaper is the modern man’s morning prayer, received a cultural and critical role to play, in the broader sense: it was supposed to contribute, along with other institutions, to the socialisation of culture and the creation of a public space capable of promoting rational public opinion. Clearly, the current conditions of both its practice and diffusion have eroded journalism with respect to the obligations that it has assumed since its origins and displaced it from what has been the field of its legitimisation for over two centuries. In fact, a portmanteau has been created to refer to this now naturalised merging of journalism and entertainment: infotainment.

Alongside this combination that signalled a trend towards the innocuous and the irresponsible, the field of journalism has been taken over by a promiscuous hyphenation – the hyphen in ‘political-media’ – suggesting professional collaboration and an alternating role between journalists and politicians. The two form an amphibious and interchangeable class that can be called either political-‑journalistic or journalistic-political. This amphibology is a sign that it is urgently
necessary to do what the media resist doing above all – self-criticism – and declare that the profession has gone awry, a conclusion that can be confidently announced today. The reasons behind this announcement are not so different from those that at the beginning of the 20th century led Karl Kraus to say, with unmatched satirical force, that the press was the ‘great prostitute of Vienna’. ‘Our profession has gone awry’ (Notre métier a mal tourné) is precisely the title of a book by two French journalists, Philippe Cohen and Elisabeth Lévy, published in 2008. There is, however, a dearth of criticism and analysis coming from the inside. If certain professional and economic activities invest in strategically underplaying their triumphs and prefer to project an image of chronic crisis, the media seem to believe that they stand to gain from silencing their shortcomings and omitting their errors. Sometimes they do it out of arrogance; other times for fear of losing the capital that they depend on the most: trust. According to this tendency towards avoiding the disclosure of their errors and faults, the general rule consists of demagogically celebrating their successes and carefully hiding their problems and failings.

As for the aforementioned amphibology concerning the passage from political to media roles (and vice versa), the Portuguese media landscape represents an extreme example of unprecedented proportions. This fact largely contributes to the excess of political ‘op-eds’ and ‘commentary’ afflicting journalism today. Journalism’s fragility (both from an economic and editorial point of view) can be measured, among other criteria, by how much the political power permeates it.

Both the politicians moving between these two fields and occupying all ‘platforms’ and the oligarchy formed by the circular and redundant logic of the media-dominated public space (which Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, captured in the maxim: ‘All that appears is good and all that is good appears’) are responsible for a journalism that could be more properly called column-writing. Column-writing journalism, ruled by editocrats (a neologism created in France a few years ago and which has served as the title of a collective book), negates the critical role of journalism and functions according to a logic of entertainment: it promotes a staging of controversy and debate that unfolds within a closed circuit and follows an endogamous, tautological and mimetic line that reaches the height of exasperation when there is a current event or subject that polarises attention. In these moments, a gregarious law prevails and the media space is swept by an overwhelming wave that grows rapidly, monopolises all attention and disappears shortly after. The news is thus dominated by a homogeneous chorus and resembles an autotelic system that feeds on itself, like Ashby’s Homeostat. Someone has called it ‘autistic communication’. From here the illusion is born – one of the greatest of our time – that this journalism creates a broad public space, typical of a transparent society, when in actuality it reduces its extension and reach. Journalism and its obscuring effects could make up a chapter in a treatise about the transformations of public space at the time of digital media. The cultural universe and the real and possible worlds that journalism avoids out of ignorance, disinterest and sheer giving-up are enormous in extent. And here the law of competition always works in reverse: it is never about looking for new ways and focusing on different things – one must do what others are doing or, if possible, anticipate what we already know others will do. This rule is followed with particular rigour in the cultural areas where journalism has conformed to the logic of ‘audiences’ and ‘cultural consumption’, which confirm and feed on themselves. A vicious cycle has thus been created, in which everything works to guarantee that we only show what has already been seen and produce what has already been consumed. 

This new political-media class (we should note that today the hyphenated term is part of the common representations and hostility of a vast number of citizens) has colonised journalism. Only this class can claim the symbolic capital – and concrete compensation – awarded by that métier gone awry. At the same time, journalists have lost power and autonomy as a professional class: they have been proletarianised and reduced to a mass that works for a ‘content industry’, which is the form of productive activity to which the mass media have uncritically conformed. As we can easily conclude, this creates an environment rife with tension: today, the media world is marked by extreme inequality and class struggle. On the one hand, we find a columnist superstructure, which, being mostly external, does not have to preoccupy itself with the newspaper in which it writes or the television channel where it comments but only has to worry about the space where it intervenes. On the other hand, we find the journalists, who are necessarily responsible for the collective effort and have to deal with less and less time, money and autonomy. The former (or at least a large number of their members) bring up to date – with a convincing semblance – a character in the German writer Gustav Freytag’s play, The Journalists, from 1853. The character, named Schmock, boasts about his ethical and political pliability, his capacity for effectively serving all tendencies. The pliability demanded today corresponds to nimbly playing the different roles staged in the media world and transiting through the whole media universe: from written media to sound media, from sound media to visual media – and vice versa, since this is always a round trip.

But we must consider an even more violent tension if we want to understand what is going on today among the media with a journalistic vocation. Alongside the rise of editocrats and the agents of column-writing, there is the rise of a managerial oligarchy as the companies become concentrated groups and constellations of titles and different media. This has made it impossible to separate editorial and financial boards, so much so that the human resources departments of the media companies have become pragmatic accessories to administrative strategies, based on a universal prescription that is applied the same way everywhere. This is obviously justified by economic constraints and executed in the name of the survival of the companies. But the issue that interests us here goes beyond labour relations. In fact, one of the main transformations in the journalism and media landscape of the last quarter century, i.e. since the new digital media started being developed on a large scale and the traditional media began losing the foundations that sustained them commercially, has consisted of ever greater intervention by the management in editorial decisions. The frenetic dance and circulation of directors and editors seen in the main media companies (all over the world, not just in Portugal) is largely explained by the fact that the role of directing within the editorial sphere has lost autonomy in favour of the management. And this is not without consequences: an enlightened and informed public, precisely the one most worth preserving, has realised that journalism has entered a process of losing legitimacy and has become vulnerable to interests that are not just political and ideological. Today, there is a cultural elite uninterested in anything produced by the media – those who used to be seen as invaluable symbolic capital that should be attracted are now excluded: the television, radio and newspapers do not cater for them.

*Translated by Ana Macedo