Here’s Why Newspapers Are Essential For Democracy To Flourish

Philip M. Stone November 26, 2009 Follow on Twitter

Carlo de Benedetti, the chairman of the Italian Gruppo Editoriale L’Expresso gave the Reuters Memorial Lecture at Oxford University this week and what he had to say about newspapers and democracy deserves a wider audience.

de Benedetti (pictured) comes from a country where newspaper readership is really low compared to the rest of Europe -- in Italy the ratio of newspapers sold to the total population is less than 10% whereas in Sweden it is 41%, in Austria 30% and in Germany 29%. There may be a Mediterranean influence in this, but Italians much prefer watching television to reading newspapers, and in a country where the prime minister has control over the most popular channels – the public broadcaster via political clout, and the biggest private stations via his Mediaset Company – there is a situation there not found in other democracies.

But Italians are coming to take more and more notice of their newspapers because it is the newspapers that have been at the vanguard in investigating the alleged sexual antics of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and since Berlusconi basically controls Italian terrestrial TV you can imagine how much of that is actually making it to the airwaves.  There may well be old scores being settled by a publisher such as de Benedetti who for various reasons doesn’t like the prime minister and that is why his La Repubblica is leading the anti-Berlusconi charge, but at least newspapers are doing something that they should be continually doing – investigating government.

Because Italians have such a high TV bias it naturally follows that is where the advertising goes.  In 2007 Italian TV got about  54% of all advertising money and that dominance makes it hard for newspapers to keep newsstand prices low enough to attract the weaker sectors of the population – not good for democracy. 

So, with that background some direct quotes from de Benedetti’s speech: According to some scholars – and I cite Robert Dahl to represent all of them – to have a good democracy, citizenship is not sufficient because it is more useful to have an “illuminated citizenship”, made up of subjects who are informed and thus are aware, or rather are aware precisely because they are informed. We are all equal as citizens, that much is obvious and thank goodness this is the case. But only citizens who have the information needed to understand certain phenomena can really give life to that delicate element, indispensable for western democracies, which goes under the name of public opinion. If citizens are not aware, we are not talking about public opinion but about common sense, which is something completely different from the point of view of the physiology of a democratic society, and also from the point of view of the relationship between citizens and power.”

de Benedetti points out that news in today’s world is available via many platforms -- print, TV, radio and of course the Internet. But a newspaper has the most important role of all – to make sense of it all. “Starting from a fact, which flashes naked and unembellished across internet screens – unmatched in terms of speed and immediacy – or across TV screens or radio waves, a newspaper organizes this fact, giving the reader an overview which aids understanding and puts it into context. It thus creates an authentic information system that enables citizen-readers to map out the issue and by reading about it form their own independent and complete final judgment. This passage is the difference between knowing and understanding, between looking and seeing, between being informed and being aware, to the point of ultimately being able to take responsibility for a reasoned personal opinion which may of course not be the same as the opinion of the newspaper, because the exchange between a newspaper and its readers is not merely a question of passing on views - that is not its function.

“The exchange is in the quality of the information given to the citizen to foster his independent free understanding of the facts. A newspaper cannot and does not aim to bind readers to its own opinion because it is not a political party: it is much less although in reality it is much more than that – albeit with totally different functions – because the relationship between the newspaper and its readers transforms the whole into a live community where the one influences the other, in the name of what it actually is that is bought and sold on the news-stands, which is to say an identity, a system of ideas which organizes and prioritizes the news of the day, putting it in order. In the name not of a political orientation, which fortunately ended with the century of ideologies, but rather in the name of a way of viewing the world and one’s own country, in the name of a window on life, of a system of values. Bearing in mind that in a democratic society it must be politics that sits at the head of the table, because it is politics that must deal the cards and look after the pack, because only politics can regulate the free-for-all of legitimate interests at play, reconciling it with the general interest.

“Thus we can understand what a scholar like Neil Postman meant when he said that democracy is “print-related”: because the mind of the citizen-reader who is at the heart of community issues in the western world is print-related. Indeed we could say that the readers of newspapers are the ideal subjects of a democracy, citizens who are aware because they are informed. Going one step further: the citizen reader is probably the homo sapiens of this century, in which at a superficial level we are celebrating the end of newspapers.

“If this is the relationship between newspapers, citizens and democracy, if this triangle can hold up against the crisis and the triumph of the internet, what sense is there in the old question which gets asked of newspapers: “Who do you support?” It is high time we abandoned this question and moved on to the real question for liberal democracies to ask of a newspaper: “Who are you”? Because it is only if I really know the nature, the soul and the culture of a newspaper, its editorial history, the transparent identity of its ownership, only then can I understand what its “idea of the country and of the world” is. Only then can I finally understand why the paper takes certain positions, and is for or against these or those people. Not as part of an abstract ideological design but because the way it is leads it to support a measure, to pass judgment on another one and to conduct a political and cultural battle.

“Because in this confusing phase of globalization, loss of identity, and crisis, newspapers have discovered that they have an amazing role as cultural mediators because they are so close to daily life, so flexible in adapting to facts as they follow them, because of the almost technical connection that they can create between events and ideas, for the intellectual energy that they can summon up, for their crucial translation of scientific or academic language of the experts for consumption by the general public. Mediation even in the literal sense of the term, because the internet in the richness of its blogs and the ranking by number of clicks inevitably rewards polarization and the most radical and extreme positions, while newspapers select, summarize, prioritize, make choices – and in so doing introduce elements of rationality and rationalization and take democratic responsibility.

“In Italy, where the political party crisis means that all of the parties are new and have no cultural or historical background, the newspapers have been processing events for readers, interweaving them with opinion and values as a point of reference, reinterpreting the controversial everyday issues of post-modernity in an ethical, cultural and political key.

“One could say that by doing this in the tiny space they have at their disposal, the papers work on the cultural foundations of a community, trying to give the reader, disorientated by the lack of sound and permanent points of reference, those elements of experience and intellectual cohesion which make it possible to view events in a way that is not purely one-off and emotional. A particularly useful function at a time when, as Zygmunt Bauman says, “nothing lasts long enough to be fully acquired”

Newspaper publishers have long argued that newspapers are essential not just for printing news, but for prioritizing it, editing it and all the rest. It is what sets print newspapers apart from the Internet. If we could only convince Internet readers there really is a cost benefit of having editors doing that for you in a convenient morning or afternoon print read, then newspapers would soon be over their financial crisis.

There will be those who will say that Internet news sites can perform the same editing functions. Maybe, but consider this -- when a guy goes to the bathroom it is not his PC that he takes with him.

See also in ftm Knowledge...

Media in Italy

The Italian media market is totally unique and very competitive. Italian consumers are quickly embracing new media and the advertising community is quickly changing. And hovering close is Italy's richest person - Silvio Berlusconi. 75 pages, includes Resources, PDF (January 2010)

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