To think about the media and journalism today is to think about a world that is changing every day much more than the world itself. And it is to think about it in the certainty of uncertainty.

These days, when all powers are threatening each other like ferocious mythological animals and devouring each other in their love, the Fourth Estate or, in a more radical idealistic version, the acclaimed “counter-power”, has talked a lot about what it expected to happen and very little about what has been happening to itself.

The causes generally blamed for the crisis facing the press and the malaise in contemporary journalism are many and easy to enumerate. But aside from what are presented as the unstoppable forces of change, there are good grounds for concluding that, within the profession itself and in the way it sees its own calling, something has gone very wrong.
 

Fake news, disinformation, a weak and shifting culture, the impossible task of regulation, private interests: Carla Baptista, lecturer and researcher in media history and the relationship between journalism and politics, looks at the factors behind the decline of journalism.

José Luis Pardo, one of Spain’s leading philosophers and essayists, argues that, in an age when it is plausible to ask whether the internet has given rise to a new public sphere, journalism has turned its back on its oldest social function. This jumps off the screen in political debates on TV, where it can be hard to distinguish between emotional pornography and politics.

As director of the Nieman Lab at the University of Harvard, Joshua Benton is uniquely placed to observe the contemporary press and the problems it faces in an age of innovation and expanding online platforms. The following interview with the journalist Cristina Margato shows that these problems carry significant political implications, as the election of Trump made clear, and they present democratic societies with a challenge.

The map of media land has been redrawn by online providers. Immediate response is now the rule, and the consequences have been profound. Jacinto Godinho, investigative journalist, in-depth reporter for Rádio e Televisão de Portugal (RTP) and lecturer in journalism, writes about the necessary relationship between journalism and fiction, and the many pitfalls this can create.

Populism – a highly current and rather elastic concept that has been used as a tag for diverse political phenomena of varying provenance – is defined in this article using nine hypotheses. The author, Yves Citton, is a French philosopher with a vast output in the field of political philosophy, a member of the editorial board of Multitudes, and author of Pour une écologie de l’attention and Médiarchie.
 

The relationship between crisis and journalism, as explored by the author in this article, is an issue that goes to the heart of modern society and the age of “uncertainty”, stretching beyond our immediate predicament and concerns. The issue of the crisis in journalism is much thornier than we usually imagine, argues Barbie Zelizer, a leading figure in journalism studies and author of important research into the relationship between journalism and historical and cultural memory.

The relationship between seeing and reasoning – the starting point for a commentary on a Becket character by Fernando Belo, a prolific author whose output ranges from teleological studies to the philosophy of language. Requested by Electra two months before the author’s death, the article is now also a tribute to the man and the philosopher, whose singular career joyfully cut across the borders of knowledge and academic disciplines.

In 1905, a young German Jew called Albert Einstein, then just a simple clerk in the Berne patents and intellectual property bureau, published five articles that shook the foundations of physics, making their author an icon of the twentieth century, the archetypal genius and model for the role of a scientist. The early studies and education (1895-1901) of this young man are the key to understanding the annus mirabilis of 1905 – and the years that followed. This period, less well known than others in his extraordinary life, is described and interpreted here by the science historian Christian Bracco, author of the recent book Quand Albert devient Einstein.