The modern understanding of journalism has fallen from being the “fourth branch of government” to, at best, an ill-defined profession. It seems that anyone can be a journalist today, because we no longer know what journalism actually is. Especially troubling is the confusion and ambivalence surrounding the relationship between democracy and journalism. Without that relationship, journalism has no North Star.
The history of democracy bears the deep imprint of centuries-long attempts to restrain it – that is, to place an optimal framework around the absolute and free rule of the majority. Historically, the most successful framework, if success is measured by global acceptance, has been representative democracy, based on a simple formula: the will of the majority (expressed in elections) selects a small number of representatives who articulate that will in parliament, where decisions are made for a functioning state whose legitimacy is ultimately derived from elections.
As the world at the beginning of the twentieth century watched the United States emerge as its most powerful nation – and the leading advocate of representative democracy – many Americans, in the aftermath of World War I, having witnessed wartime propaganda firsthand, removed their rose-colored glasses when assessing the state of democracy.
Optimists, aware of the blurred line between propaganda and news, believed that the source of the problem lay not in democracy itself but in the elites who controlled it and led states into war. What was needed, they argued, was a stronger voice for the majority –less restraints imposed on democracy. As part of the Progressive movement in the United States, they embraced what might be called a majoritarian creed: an almost absolute faith in elections, referendums, polls, and other forms of mass expression as the best indicators of collective political preferences. For them, the opinion of the majority was the sole and decisive criterion for the legitimacy of decisions in a democratic state.
Others, who approached the problem of modern democracy more critically, were confronted by a dilemma forged in four years of wartime disinformation and manipulation: can the majority legitimately endorse a policy if its decision is based on propaganda? And, taking skepticism a step further – can the majority decide anything meaningful at all in the modern world?
Omnipotent citizens
The most prominent spokesperson for this skepticism was Walter Lippmann, a journalist and political commentator, and the most serious critic of the Progressives. In his books Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, he challenged the belief that citizens are capable of deliberating about and deciding on political matters:
The average individual, Lippmann argued, barely has half an hour a day – exhausted after work and before family obligations – to reflect on the many social issues of an increasingly complex world. Deprived of deep understanding and fed by the media with simplified representations of complex problems, such individuals are capable, at best, of forming vague and crude associations of words, images, and ideas.
“The citizen of the real democracies has neither the time, nor the interest, nor the knowledge, nor the capacity to think effectively about public affairs.”
As a result, all methods of aggregating majority preferences – elections, referendums, polls, and the like – are merely murky conglomerations of uninformed impressions, or what Lippmann called stereotypes and “pictures in our heads.” These cannot yield rational decisions and, when translated into policy, may produce unpredictable consequences. Citizens, Lippmann maintained, live like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, in a pseudo-environment rather than in the traditional and unattainable vision of democracy inspired by Aristotle, which rests on the false ideal of the omnipotent citizen. The majoritarian creed, therefore, can do no more than measure preferences for which there is no guarantee of a meaningful understanding of society.
Unlike Plato’s philosopher-kings, Lippmann located the solution in technocracy. The only way leaders and statesmen can make informed decisions, he argued, is by relying on the best available information supplied by a vast bureaucratic apparatus of experts from various government agencies staffed with scientists. In Lippmann’s state, citizens are external observers of decision-making processes – not participants. Elections thus become ritual acts through which citizens periodically resolve conflicts among elites.
Burdened by the cognitive overload of modern society and lacking the time and capacity to cope with it, democratic citizens are assigned an impossible task: to see the world clearly and make sound political judgments. In Lippmann’s democratic realism, democracy cannot function successfully without an independent, expert organization that renders invisible facts intelligible to decision-makers. This leads to a stalemate: defenders of democracy cannot abandon the importance of majority rule, while Lippmann cannot accept that the majority is capable of making reasonable decisions. At this point enters the philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey.
Possible citizens
Although the disagreement between Lippmann and Dewey is often portrayed as a kind of virtual debate, it is more accurate to say that Dewey carried out a seemingly illogical but ultimately essential synthesis for modern democracy – a reconciliation of Lippmann’s elitism with the Progressives’ majoritarian creed.
Dewey agreed that there was a problem of knowledge in classical democratic theory, rooted in its illusionary demand for the omnipotent citizen. However, he argued, omnipotence is not required. What is required are conditions under which citizens can acquire and use the knowledge and skills necessary for effective participation in democracy.
While acknowledging Lippmann’s concerns, Dewey criticized the view of the individual as a passive subject confronting knowledge as an external object. Put simply, he rejected the idea that knowledge arises in isolation, within an individual mind, through interaction with objects alone. On the contrary, knowledge is created in community. This flawed understanding of cognition goes hand in hand with a flawed psychology that views humans as atomized, isolated individuals. Human beings are social creatures, and they learn about the world through society. For Dewey, knowledge emerges through communication and depends on socially transmitted, developed, and validated traditions, tools, and methods.
“The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”
This process of creating collective knowledge – what Dewey called social knowledge – pervades many aspects of life, from how work is done to how industries function. It is the product of accumulated culture, not the original possession of individuals. Social knowledge is not invented or learned by individuals in isolation; it is absorbed through culture. In the context of politics and democracy, this social process enables citizens to acquire what might be called democratic competencies. These do not require omnipotent citizens, but rather citizens who exist and learn within a community and experience democracy as a way of life.
Experts thus lose the central role assigned to them by Lippmann. In Dewey’s participatory, or deliberative, democracy, citizens identify problems and challenges in society, while experts contribute through their dedication and specialized knowledge to solving those problems:
In this relationship between citizens and experts, what is needed are not all-knowing citizens, but citizens who, through education and the public sphere, gain the capacity to judge their own needs and to assess the quality of the knowledge and information they receive on important issues.
A functional democracy therefore depends on the establishment of a deliberative community. Experts contribute to this community by enlightening the public with knowledge acquired through rigorous work on major social problems. Their role is to inform public opinion, while citizens, through deliberation in the public sphere, crystallize preferences that can be translated into policy. We are surrounded by vast amounts of knowledge and information, Dewey warned, but they are useless if their pathway to politics does not run through the local community.
Building such a society – capable of reflective self-development – is no easy task. Dewey cautioned that society would remain forever in an “infantile state of social knowledge” unless four basic conditions for democratic life are met:
- Conditions for free inquiry and the acquisition of knowledge about society.
- Conditions for the free and effective exchange and transmission of research results.
- Support for developing citizens’ capacities for rational judgment, deliberation, and action.
- Support for the free and effective use of these capacities.
If a journalist today wishes to practice the profession ethically and with meaningful purpose, they must understand the connection between journalism and democracy. Everything else is self-sabotage.
The first two conditions are prerequisites for the existence of the media, while the latter two are conditions that the media themselves should help fulfill. Without freedom to acquire and exchange knowledge, the media operate within a narrow framework of permissible viewpoints. Such freedom currently exists only in some liberal democracies.
The debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey produced one of the most valuable understandings of the relationship between journalism and democracy – an understanding as relevant today as it was a century ago – as well as a paradigm for addressing major social issues through discussion.
Ultimately, I believe that one natural outcome of properly grasping the inseparable bond between journalism as a profession and liberal democracy is the practice of radical transparency in reporting.
Author: Mladen Lazarević, communication manager, Institute for Development and Innovation
