The worst threats to journalism come from politicians. The best defence against them is serving the public

Today is World News Day, a global initiative to draw public attention to the role that journalists play in providing trustworthy news and information that serves citizens and democracy.  

It is a good day to underline that the biggest threats to that role are political, and that the best and last line of defence against these threats is public support for independent journalism. 

Prominent politicians across the world are directly attacking inconvenient journalists with threats, lawsuits, or worse. They pressure platform companies to remove their work. They belittle and vilify individual reporters when it suits them, often singling out women and minorities. They encourage their supporters to distrust the news, and sometimes incite them to attack journalists.  

While depressing, we should not be surprised that this is so.  

At its best, independent journalism seeks to hold power to account. When have people in positions of power last liked being held to account? Independent journalists and those in power are not natural friends. They are arguably not meant to be friends. When some journalists sidle up to them, their colleagues, often rightly, criticise the results as toothless access journalism. 

When some politicians humoured journalists in the past, it was not out of kindness. It was because they needed them to reach a wide audience. As news media diminish in reach and fewer people trust them, and a growing number of digital media channels and other forms of campaign communication mean politicians and other powerful people no longer need them to the same extent, politicians are no longer so solicitous. 

At their worst, political threats to journalism across the world are often part of wider, systematic, sustained efforts to weaken, undermine, or even dismantle the formal and informal institutions of democracy. 

A challenging landscape

We live in a democratic recession. As my Oxford colleague Nancy Bermeo has pointed out, it is often driven by what political scientists call “executive aggrandisement”, where governments, after taking power by broadly speaking democratic means, start chipping away at all forms of meaningful accountability, often focusing first on the civil service, regulators, the courts, and the news media, while continuing to hold elections to maintain a veneer of democratic legitimacy. 

But even in countries where the formal and informal institutions of democracy remain robust, while leaders like to give speeches about the importance of press freedom, if you pay attention to what they do rather than what they say, you will see there is little substantial political support for independent journalism. 

At home, prominent politicians in liberal democracies give fewer interviews to reporters (and more to podcasters and influencers). They take few, if any, questions at press conferences and other staged events, and leave it to various underlings to handle their public relations. They enthusiastically embrace social media and digital advertising as ways to circumvent editorial gatekeepers. And in countries where public service media and subsidies for private publishers exist, politicians have often cut their funding in recent years. 

While European and American politicians criticise media repression by geopolitical rivals like China and Russia, they are supremely pragmatic in their dealings with many other political peers who aggressively seek to control the media and silence independent journalists. They do deals with autocrats among fellow EU and NATO leaders, curry favour with the despots ruling fossil fuel states in the Gulf, and jockey for position with the would-be strongman rulers of rising powers. 

Donald Trump and other self-styled populists in democratic countries, and Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin among the autocrats, are easy to identify as enemies of independent journalism, because they are so blatant. 

Even as their overt attacks are especially worrying, we should also take time to recognize those who stand by and do little or nothing as the threats to independent journalism multiply. Many powerful political leaders of a more moderate persuasion, from Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron to Angela Merkel, have happily given speeches about media freedom now and then, but in their time in power made few tangible commitments to protect and enable it. 

So if powerful politicians treat independent journalism with outright hostility at worst or benign indifference at best, who can journalists and news media turn to for support when they try to pursue their mission of seeking truth and reporting it? 

The public that they aim and claim to serve.  

What journalism can do for the public

Everything important about journalism and its role in our society hinges on its relation with the public – its political impact, its social significance, its sustainability as an independent institution. 

When social scientists like myself try to assess the democratic importance of independent journalism, the main yardstick is what it can do for the public – and the evidence is strong that, with its imperfections, it can deliver much that we value. 

People who engage with news tend to be more knowledgeable about public affairs, more resilient to misinformation, more active in politics, and more connected with their communities than peers who do not. (It is not all positive, however – news use can also distort people’s perception of crime, migration, and minorities in very negative ways.)  

Above and beyond this, research shows that even those who do not engage much with news benefit when independent journalism seeks to hold power to account. Research suggests that journalistic attention can reduce corruption, reduce how often politicians lie and mislead, and increase the chance that they vote in line with their constituents’ ideals and interests. (Again, the findings are not all positive – news also tends to reinforce established hierarchies by privileging the perspectives of the powerful people who are deemed intrinsically newsworthy.) 

So despite its shortcomings, journalism, at its best, has much to offer the public.  

But the public also has something important to offer journalism – support that, at best, deter political attacks, and at least help build resilience to resist attempts to undermine independent news media. 

How journalism is failing

That support is premised on people routinely engaging with the news, trusting it, and believing that journalism is true to its stated ideals of providing independent coverage of issues of common concern – not just more “content” published for profit or personal gain. 

On all three counts – reach, trust, and confidence – the social contract between journalism and much of the public is fraying.  

Even in Germany, where the situation is better than many other countries, the signs are clear. 

Our research at the University of Oxford documents precipitous declines over the last ten years in the audience reach of television, radio, and print news media – down 20 points – and little meaningful growth in how many say they use the websites and apps of established news media. Similarly, trust in news has declined sharply, down from sixty percent saying that they felt they could trust most news most of the time in 2015 to forty-three percent in 2024. 

And when we asked in 2022, just forty one percent of Germans said they believed the news media are free from undue political or government influence (the numbers were similar for undue business or commercial influence). More broadly, people’s expressed interest in news is down, the number of people who say they often or sometimes avoid the news has grown, and in our qualitative research, even people who do use news increasingly say they often find it depressing, irrelevant, and useless. 

It is tempting for journalists, and those who still trust them and respect their work, to assume that such concerns, most polemically expressed in terms of historically tainted terms like “Lügenpresse” or “Systemmedien”, are primarily found on the far right of the political spectrum. Data from our Digital News Report surveys shows that they are more pronounced among those who identify as very-right wing. But they are not at all limited to the political extremes. Trust in news is lower among younger people, among people with low income, among people with low levels of formal education, and it has declined across the political spectrum in recent years. The differences in who routinely engage with the news are also much more pronounced for age, income and education than for political orientation.  

In short, journalism still has a strong connection with older, affluent, highly educated, politically moderate people. But it is losing touch with much of the rest of the public. It is at ever-greater risk of being for the privileged few, not for the many. 

This is a problem for those citizens who are missing out on some of the positive effects of news use that research has documented. It is also a problem for journalism, because it weakens the public support that it relies on, especially when political threats grow and multiply. Why would people care about journalism if they believe journalism does not care about them? 

What can be done? 

This year’s World News Day campaign, under the slogan “Choose Truth”, aims to invite people to “to support trusted news outlets.” At the heart of the coalition behind the campaign is the World Association of News Publishers WAN-IFRA, which comprises 3,000 news publishers and technology companies and 60 national publishers’ associations representing 18,000 publications in 120 countries. With the campaign, WAN-IFRA President Ladina Heimgartner says, “we underscore our shared commitment to defend the principles of fact-based journalism”. 

I wish the World News Day well, but I have to say that our research suggests that encouraging people to choose truth, support trusted news outlets, and insisting that vastly different publishers have a shared commitment to accurate, independent reporting is unlikely to work with the growing parts of the public who are increasingly turning their back on the news.  

People want reliable, truthful reporting. They want access to news outlets they can trust. They would like journalists to operate with a shared commitment to accuracy and independence. The problem journalists and publishers face is that much of the public does not believe that the news media offer this. 

It is hard to see how basically saying “but that’s what we do!” is going to change anybody’s mind. Just insisting more loudly and intensely that journalism offers capital-T truth is not persuasion, it is preaching to the converted. Saying that people should support trusted news outlets begs the question – which ones should they trust and why? 

Suggesting that all publishers have a shared commitment to fact-based journalism is a bold assertion. Is it the editorial line and professional judgement of all World News Day participants that the whole public ought to trust all news media, including those WAN-IFRA members which are de facto state controlled or party organs? Is it the editorial line and professional judgement of the New York Times that people should trust Fox News in the United States? Does the Guardian believe that people should trust the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom? Does Zeit think people should trust Bild in Germany? 

Journalists need to listen

Asserting a commitment to truth, trustworthiness, and the principles of fact-based journalism may help remind already-engaged audiences of what the news media they rely on say they offer. But I do not think it will do much to change anybody’s mind, and thus things will go on. 

Underserved and discontent parts of the public will continue to feel underserved by and discontent with the news media. Bellicose politicians of a populist inclination will continue to attack journalism. Moderate establishment political figures will give the occasional speech about independent journalism even as they stand by and do essentially nothing, as even governments of some EU member states continue to stifle free media. Politicians will not take major steps to help revitalise independent journalism – why would they want to be held more aggressively to account when they have so many other ways of communicating to and with citizens? 

If journalists and publishers want to revive independent journalism, they cannot rely on people in positions of power. They have to rely on the public. 

Renewing the social contract between journalism and the public will take more than simply insisting that news is great as it is. It will require understanding why so many people increasingly feel that it is not. Maybe that is an idea for next year’s World News Day: to dedicate it to journalists taking time to talk with people rather than at them. Maybe the slogan could be less a command – choose truth! – and more a question posed to the public that the profession ultimately relies on – what can we do for you?

This piece was originally published by the German news outlet 'Zeit'.