Why are there people who no longer believe in journalism?

It is impossible to understand the loss of credibility of journalism and experts as a conflict between the rationality of an elite and the stupidity of the majority, an incomplete and sterile framework that only exacerbates the problem. Faced with the obviousness that the far-right distorts facts to create the narrative that best suits it politically, one cannot respond with the idea that the center, the left, journalism, or academia are representatives of a neutral reality without biases and that people who do not accept it are malevolent and/or stupid. The reality is that we can distinguish between truth and lies at the elementary level of facts, but in social and political matters there is always a necessarily partial view that implies value judgments and taking positions that permeate everything, from the wording of a headline to the order and weight that an expert gives to each element of their supposedly impartial explanation. The crisis of journalism must be understood from a much more paradoxical and counterintuitive perspective than the narrative of good versus bad.

The first paradox is that, at the beginning of Modernity, knowledge was the main emancipatory force with which citizens fought the tyranny of power. This situation has been completely reversed, and now knowledge is the tool with which power legitimizes its control over citizens. In Antiquity, the authority of aristocrats and the Church was based on complete submission of the type "because I say so," and the Enlightenment's commitment to reason and science served to dismantle this arbitrary domain and liberate people. The revolution has been so absolute that, today, the only way power has to justify the limits of what can and cannot be done is "because the experts say so."

The thing is that this, which on paper seems like a net gain, has led us to a new and much more complicated situation to judge. At the time of truth, the powerful do not always make legitimate use of knowledge, but rather instrumentalize it to disguise class interests and value judgments. For example: for years, neoliberal economists paraded through the media to explain to us that economic science said that deindustrializing ourselves and opening ourselves to the flow of global capital without any kind of regulation was a great idea. But even in matters of harder sciences where objectivity seems indisputable, we have understood that there is a political leap between the epidemiological description of a virus and the measures to be taken to combat it. And journalism in recent decades has too often become an agent that presented the political content of a decision as if it were the immaculate truth of a technocratic oracle.

This ambiguous marriage between authorities and knowledge has led to another paradox: the far-right can appropriate the accumulated resentment against the bad decisions of experts and load the criticism of the technocratic caste with the insurmountable emotional energy of emancipatory causes when, in reality, the political project of the new right is to replace one form of obedience with another even more abnegated and absurd. For this reason too, the far-right is not unmasked by accusing it of making a discourse that does not correspond to the facts and that's all, but it must be demonstrated that the measures it proposes are contradictory to the same political objectives it claims to defend; that behind its call for freedom and protection there is a program that will leave people even more exposed. The anti-establishment enjoymentthat the new rights channel is not dismantled by a call to respect the authority of the current establishment, but by revealing how both continue to defend forms of injustice and exploitation.

Journalism will never regain credibility if it takes sides with authority: it must take sides with democracy. And, contrary to what we are usually told, democracy is not a stable system based on the resigned obedience of citizens to the power of a minority that knows what is good for us (that is aristocracy), but on the desires and aspirations of a people who always demonstrate that the system is never fully up to the promises it makes. The beauty of democracy is that, unlike the authoritarianism of a monarch, a religious leader, or a scientific expert, it never settles for a closed social order and always keeps a crack open for doubt and criticism. Therefore, all democratic conquest is always the result of having gone beyond what the old order said was an impossible limit to overcome. If those of us who write in the media are capable of rising to the challenge of this difficult task, we will immediately break the false dialectic between rationality and emotion, and journalism will regain the emancipatory vibration that lies at its origin and which is precisely the source of its credibility.