Robert Murdoch founded Fox News in 1996, to provide, he said, fair and equitable information. He wanted, he still claimed, to create a counterpost to the conventional American media, which in his eyes were only the propaganda organs of the Democratic Party.
According to the ideology that drives his empire, the news media are just that: propaganda companies. And, in six decades of his career, he has done everything to prove himself right. In the United States, he therefore launched and generously financed this famous ultra-conservative channel, whose activity is essentially partisan, and which makes its cabbage fat outrageous, sensationalism and intellectual dishonesty.
Fox News made a significant contribution to the election of Donald Trump, as well as that of George W. Bush. Today, the channel is viewed by many as the voice of the Trump administration banned from social media. We are waiting for the day when they will set up a studio in Mar-a-Lago to shoot a current affairs program, a sort of Radio London from those who already tried to take the Capitol almost a year ago. After all, they’ve already aired from Sarah Palin’s home.
Because the conservative vision of a world that is sinking into a vast partisan war is invading public space. In all liberal democracies, conservative stars roar to radicalize the right on the airwaves of opinion and television channels where journalism has virtually ceased to be practiced. And of course, they denounce with virulence “the media party” which in their eyes form the public radio and the big liberal dailies. Éric Zemmour, prospective candidate for the presidency in France, former columnist who now plays the Parisian Donald Trump, does not only propose to ban foreign first names or to restore Gallic gallantry in his rights. He also promises to privatize public broadcasters. We must kill this beast.
There is no impartial media, of course. They all have biases. It could well be argued that Radio-Canada or France Inter, for example, are the expression of a largely liberal culture, in the moral sense of the term. We have read Chomsky, Bernays, Habermas, Lippman, Dewey or Orwell enough to know that there are always propaganda effects in journalistic practices. But until now, media criticism has aimed to limit the perverse effects of the public opinion system in order to maintain a place for reason in the City. The aim was to demonstrate that it is always possible to hope that knowledge will end up eclipsing ignorance, that freedom will overcome obscurantism, that democracy is not just a facade of virtue to camouflage the acts of plutocrats and demagogues. To be free, in fact, requires acquiring, on a regular, reflective and honest basis, knowledge about society, a condition sine qua non of any participation in the building of a common world. It is in a way the modern ideal of a democratic culture.
Media dynamics
Today, we are witnessing a diversion of these reflections on media power. Ultra-conservative media, which mass produce opinion, propagate a critical discourse that is absolutely indifferent to this democratic ideal of culture. It denounces the diversitarian well-thinking of the competitors – public radio and television, the old liberal press -, they mock their wokism and their bias for the often very real silliness of the time. But if this militant right lashes out at certain liberal tricks, it is never to concretely support the independence of the editorial staff or the importance of rigorous journalism. She denounces them because she hates them, which still happens in a democracy, but she does so in a belligerent spirit that reduces the dynamics of the media to editorial attacks.
Political conservatism increasingly imposes on society its conviction that the media are only machines for producing cultural hegemony.
The idea is thus established that public debate is only an enterprise of opinion, persuasion and manipulation of perceptions. The radical right calls everywhere for the freedom of the spirit, the high culture and the scholarly exchanges, but always in the mode of the harangues. Its stars defend thought on television sets where to avoid ridicule, it is precisely necessary to refrain from thinking. She walks in the footsteps of Rupert Murdoch, and wants us to believe that the free competition of opinions, however frivolous, is the only one that is worthwhile. The big replacement? Let’s discuss it. Pétain would have saved the Jews? Let’s take a look at where this idea came from. The latest sulphurous statement from the popular populist? It is necessary to talk about it.
Let us realize that this amounts to convincing ourselves that journalism and the free press do not exist. That there is no honor possible in this profession. That an effort of reflection in the human sciences would have little more meaning than a rowdy editorial written on the corner of a table. That an opinion repeated 14,000 times on TV, on the radio, in the newspapers, as well say a political communication campaign, would be a heroic defense of civilization. Let us realize that this is tantamount to believing in the existence of free competition of opinions where monopolies and large media groups reign. All of this, while arguing that the world, frankly, would be much better off if our taxes stopped funding infamous public broadcasters.
There is a déjà vu in this affair. At the end of the Second World War, Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of the newspaper The world, denounced the “industrial press” of the interwar period which “was going to sink into collaboration”. Albert Camus also hoped for a press “free of money”. This writer and great journalist then launched this warning which, obviously, addresses the contemporary conscience: “a society which supports being distracted by a dishonored press runs into slavery”. The unfortunate thing is that the wisdom of Camus would pass today for a call for censorship.
* Mark Fortier wrote, with Serge Bouchard, Diesel in the veins – the saga of the northern truckers, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award of 2021, essay category. He is also the author of Identity melancholies. A year reading Mathieu Bock-Côté.
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