posed a critical question, which, I confess I have been surprised for years has not been more frequently and more seriously propounded:
"An elementary observation that has held true for at least ten years: the press has a bad press in public opinion. Each year, the newspaper La Croix along with [the market polling organization] Sofres studies the level of trust accorded to the media. There is nothing reassuring in the results: the number of people who mistrust journalists regularly exceeds 40%. It is frequently a majority of the people. Yes, radio makes out O.K. Yes, the Internet has won initial credibility compared to official media. But these are paltry consolations. What would people say about an industry 40% of its customers questioned? Where would automobile production be if over a third of drivers considered their vehicles to be dangerous? And pharmaceutical laboratories if patients didn't believe in their medicines? Yet that's the constant score the information industry has earned the last ten years."
Yes, in effect, I am tempted to say, what profession could allow itself to ignore the type of warning that this sort of poll should, it seems, comprise, for as long as the press has done? The least one may say is that recognition of the existence of the major - and perhaps vital - problem for the industry that the surveys have revealed for years is singularly belated. And, in any case, there is reason to fear that this is once again one of those problems that is periodically reported with a certain amount of emphasis, only for the press to go on to the next thing, without losing a minute, and without any real consequence.
"Let them despise us, as long as they read us!"
I could add that some of us had already raised this question a long time ago (I did, for example, in my book about Kraus "Schmock ou le triomphe du journalisme" ["Schmuck or the Triumph of Journalism"]) and sought - in vain - to focus the attention of the press on it.
But I must note that the press does not willingly accept criticisms from people who do not belong to its own milieu, except when they are so friendly and understanding that no consequences have to be suffered and no real problem is presented. And it is also true that one may live for a long time and even rather comfortably with a bad reputation. That, undoubtedly, explains how newspapers have been able to apply the principle I formulated in my book as: "Let them despise us, as long as they read us!" for so long. All the same, I thought I saw a certain progress in Laurent Joffrin's article: It clearly suggested that the problems the press suffers were not invented by cranky readers or ill-disposed critics and that it behooves the press itself to take the initiative to reform itself if it wants to have a chance of survival.
Has the press gone - as it did in the case of Karl Kraus's Austria that you cited earlier - from a relationship of colluding with power to one of submitting to it?
You have surely noticed that with respect to practically every one of the problems we have just mentioned, Kraus has already said just about everything that needs to be said and with a power that I do not believe has been equaled since. He also understood that the press, which he perceived as a devoted auxiliary in the universal market system, was almost inescapably dragged down in a process of progressive descent to ultimate uniformity at the lowest level. That obviously gives me no pleasure in any way, but I am forced to observe that what is happening right now proves him broadly right. The only press that still sells enough and that has no serious economic problems now is the tabloid press, that is, the press that lives primarily off satisfying the public's unhealthy curiosity about things that generally have nothing to do with them and about which there is no need to know anything whatsoever. The problem is that - as certain recent events confirm - the so-called "serious" press will probably be more tempted all the time to at least partially imitate the tabloid press example.
As for the question of independence, Kraus was convinced that there is no real moral and intellectual independence without independence both from political power and from economic and financial power. It is remarkable that up until recently, whenever some of us suggested that the press today could have a problem from that perspective that would probably become more worrying all the time, we heard journalists generally respond with commiseration that the representatives of the press enjoy complete freedom of thought and action and are able to write absolutely whatever they want. That's always a difficult point to argue with them, because they believe, as, moreover, do most people, that all they need is to feel they are behaving freely in order for them to be truly doing so. Yet it's a commonplace to note that one may demonstrate an extreme conformism, docility, even servility in one's behavior, and at the same time feel one is determining one's own behavior altogether freely.
A snob by definition is someone who never perceives himself to be one (in this regard, look at what Proust writes in "A la recherche du temps perdu," about Legrandin) and those who think and act pretty much solely in function of the zeitgeist and current fashion, in the intellectual as well as any other domains, are always convinced they are making absolutely free, and even original and courageous, choices.
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Karl Kraus
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Sarkozy or Government by the Press
If I tell you this, it's because journalists, who are condemned by the essence of their work to think largely as a function of the news, of the truth of the day and the currently obvious, are particularly exposed to the temptation to behave as followers, having all the while the impression of being - on the contrary - pioneers. On the question of the independence of the press, the important point is obviously that a succession of very worrying and very revealing episodes which have affected different newspapers, including, most recently, Le Monde, have shown that, far from being resolved, this issue is now more than ever current and critical, and that the threat that weighs on freedom and pluralism is likely to become more and more specific and concrete. Obviously, I should have preferred that the dawning of awareness be a little less belated. If one must resist, it is certainly better to begin to do so when one still has the means. But, unfortunately, it was never certain that the press truly had the means. What strikes me is precisely the distressing predictability of everything that is in the process of coming to be.
Can we dream of a truly free and autonomous press, devoted to the cause of truth and justice in a world in which information has become a simple commodity, subject, like all other commodities, just about exclusively to the laws of supply and demand? A world in which the reign of the market and the power of money have become as absolute and tyrannical as they are now? How does that which is economic nonsense in the eyes of the new realists who now make the law not come to also eventually appear as nonsense pure and simple? Dreaming of the sort of press most of us continue to dream of could be just about as unreasonable as dreaming of a form of capitalism that in the end is moral - which is, nonetheless, the sort of thing that makes us hope and in which those presently holding political and economic power pretend to believe. It is, it seems, indispensable and urgent to "de-demonize" money. That's the sort of discourse maintained as much by the president of the Republic as by the thinker who seems to have become the benchmark intellectual on the Left, Bernard-Henri Lévy. For myself, I rather should have thought it above all necessary to avoid deifying money to the point it has been at present. Given where we already are, I prefer, I admit, to not think about the situation the world will be in when what some demand will have been completely realized and the last remains of shame and guilty conscience - to the extent there still are any - will have disappeared. If I allow myself to mention this question, it's because I don't know what real chance exists today for a press concerned to defend the values that initially inspired its creation and that justify its existence in the face of the morally, socially, and humanly destructive power of King-Money.
The new President of the Republic behaves like a veritable advertising agency, totally dominating the agenda: what is the medias' share of responsibility for this situation?
Kraus said, in a formula the crudeness of which, even given the share of satirical exaggeration, may shock, that the natural state of the press is prostitution. It undoubtedly would have been better to say "submission," which is already worrying enough. Unfortunately, it's a fact the press has just recently resoundingly reconfirmed. I was, I confess, even though there is decidedly very little left in this domain that can still really surprise me, completely flummoxed by the deference and the docility with which the great majority - if not the virtual totality - of the press met the new president's desires and demands. Before the First World War, an Austrian minister whom Kraus quotes, had said that it was impossible to rule in Austria without the press. It was, of course, already becoming impossible almost everywhere to rule without the press. But we now have a president of the Republic in France who has decided not only to rule with the press and the media, but more or less literally, through them. And that was obviously possible only with their avid support.
Don't Count on Reporters' Moral Sense
It's true that things are already in the process of changing, since it seems that it is now more the time for systematic distancing and criticism, to the point that Jean-François Kahn, with the sense of decorum that characterizes him, felt the need to protest against what he considers an unacceptable lynching attempt. But the change I'm talking about is not in the least bit comforting, first of all, because the space given to the Head of State's person, his actions and gestures, whether private or public, continues to be totally disproportionate; secondly, because it all simply means that the press, once again obeying the necessity of conforming to the truth of the moment, perhaps understood that the wind was in the process of turning and it was necessary above all not to be caught behind in that regard.
Kraus, analyzing the behavior of newspapers in certain critical political situations, said that, in general, they prudently wait to know who is the stronger so they can line up on his side. I'm not surprised that journalists who hear such things protest indignantly. But they would certainly be better positioned to do so if the press did not quite so regularly supply us with the proof that its tendency is to behave in exactly this manner. If we compare the attitude it generally maintained before the presidential election to the way it began to behave immediately afterward, it's difficult to see things in any other light.
Kraus held that the press in Austria had become a veritable threat to privacy; is that what's happening to us?
I hope not, if only because privacy is certainly better protected legally against abusive intrusions by the press than it was in Austria at the time Kraus went to war against the newspaper world. One cannot ever overemphasize the decisive importance he accorded that aspect of his work. He considered private life and the private sphere an inviolable territory which journalists should be prevented from penetrating by means as rigorous and repressive as should prove to be necessary. He never believed for a moment that one could essentially count on reporters' moral sense and on what they call their "professional code of ethics" for things to happen in a roughly acceptable manner. What happened in Austria at the beginning of the nineteen twenties was obviously not reassuring, since a "new journalism" appeared that was still more cynical in Kraus's eyes than the old one, and sometimes even outright villainous. Precisely the development he had predicted and dreaded had occurred in journalism's tendency towards sensationalism and the most repugnant kind of gutter press that even went so far - as was the case with Békessy (the all-powerful proprietor of a press empire that was criminal in nature and that Kraus ended up completely exposing and having chased out of Vienna in 1926) - as to openly practice blackmail and extortion.
Pleasantly Surprised
Of course, I am not saying that we are really threatened with something of this nature; we are even less so at this moment probably than countries such as England and Germany. Fortunately, we recently escaped, if I remember correctly, the risk of having a French version of the "Bild-Zeitung." But how much longer shall we remain so sheltered? We mustn't forget that, in spite of everything, the risk also exists among us here and that the temptation to cross the line that separates public and private life - to the extent one is still disposed to agree that such a line exists - is strong and permanent, precisely because that's what an ever-larger number of readers seem to demand and because that's what has the most impact, attracts the most readers and consequently earns the most money. As the way the Nouvel Observateur just behaved by making public a message from the President of the Republic that quite obviously ought to have remained private and which led to the consequences we know, attests, we have reason to think that even the most serious newspapers in principle will have more trouble resisting that temptation in the future. And one may also observe once again on that occasion the considerable difficulty newspapers have clearly acknowledging and frankly repenting the bad acts they commit.
Given this background, what do you expect of a new journalistic project?
I shall surely not surprise you when I tell you I am rather pessimistic on this subject. It seems to me that the requirements one has the right to demand of a press worthy of that name are perfectly well known and always have been in one way or another. They are, moreover, the ones that newspapers aspiring to respectability announce as the principles that permanently guide their behavior. The problem - to speak once again like Kraus - is the striking difference that exists between the honorable façade that gives onto the street and the frequently unsavory things that go on behind it in a more or less invisible and impossible-to-acknowledge way. What I mean is that - just like the ideals that must crucially continue to inspire journalism - the sometimes screeching evils that absolutely must be remedied have been recalled I don't know how many times in I don't know how many ways recently, unfortunately without that changing much of anything that goes on. That's precisely one of the wounds that results from the tendency of the press to talk about a problem that suddenly seems urgent one moment and then to almost immediately forget it to go on to something else. Obviously, the press also behaves precisely this way when the problems involved are its own. What I could hope with respect to the press is sufficiently obvious, I believe, from what I said here earlier. But I don't have many illusions about the possibility of obtaining it. And I don't need to tell you that I particularly mistrust professions of faith, statements of intention, charters, good conduct codes etc. that up until now have not prevented much and never will. That does not mean, of course, that I am not disposed to consider a new journalistic project with sympathy. But I fear I am obliged to say first that I sincerely hope, with respect to the only thing that really counts - that is its realization - to be pleasantly surprised.
Jacques Bouveresse gave this interview at the inauguration of the new French in-depth news subscription web site, Mediapart, which was launched last week under the management of former Le Monde Executive Editor Edwy Plenel. This interview is translated and republished with permission from Mediapart.
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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