In Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, she explicates in a brief but poignant section the connection between propaganda, its effects on public discourse and the insidious ways in which totalitarian regimes can exploit the framework of mass sentiment through media. [1] It is not only telling of her work, but speaks to the weightiness of the issues, that Arendt wrote in the late 1940s and 1950s, well before the media proliferation and technological change which now constitutes a brave new world regarding the relationship between media and power and confronted many long-standing assumptions about public discourse.

The goal of this analysis, is to unpack the relationship between the traditional values of the free press and its relationship to a functioning democracy by exploring some of the work done by Jacques Ellul on propaganda as a fundamental currency of communication in our contemporary world. [2] By exploring the conceptual contours between his work on propaganda and studies of the free press, we can more precisely identify the causal mechanisms that connect the media to democracy, and push back against the tempting narrative that the free press is purely a mechanism of objective information dissemination. Rather, we will suggest that the media's tendency is to constitute a public narrative, or more likely, competing public narratives within the democratic system.

An important in road to this study is to clarify a departure from what Anthony Lewis (the Pullitzer prize winning reporter and legal journalist) aptly identifies as a uniquely modern conception—specifically in America—about the relationship between democracy and the free press: It was only in this century that the idea of reporting the news objectively came to dominate the thinking of the press—or at least that of the serious press. And by midcentury it did dominate. [...] But objectivity turned out to be a flawed ethic. [...] Isolated facts were not enough. A thoughtful report needed context. So newspapers began publishing more interpretive stories, trying to show the larger meaning of events—and such stories have become a standard part of every major newspaper's reporting. [3]

From the writing of the first amendment in the constitution up until the early 20th century figures like William Randolph Hearst, newspapers were strongly editorialized. It seems plausible, that this shift in the public perception of journalism may have occured as a recoil from the use of propaganda by authoritarian regimes in the 20th century. [4] Whatever the precise reasons, this "ethic of objectivty," as Lewis refers to it, has a flawed Laplacean logic that idealizes the role of information and data flow. This still has a hold on our American consideration of the role of the free press in democracy. [5] It seems that our inability to overthrow this basic Laplacean logic is part and parcel to the anxiety created in the public sphere and words to disable individuals from parse competing narratives with a sophisticated—and democratic—political framework.

It should be specified how Lewis' observation about this journalistic "ethic of objectivity" can be seen desribed as "Laplacean logic." As Peter Pomerantsev's book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (a title which plays on a distinct excerpt from Arendt), it is clear that the links between media, the masses and public discourse in a society (democratic or otherwise) must be understood at a deeper level than merely the transmission and dissemination of objective data and facts. Laplace writes: An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. [6]

In simplified form, Laplace's basic hypothesis concerned the deterministic nature of the universe and viewed as a comprehensible and closed system of discreet items. If an intellect were given all of the data points, it would be able to not only properly understand the nature of everything that had happened in the past, but it would be capable of predicting the future.

The function of journalism and the free press in a democracy cannot be fully evaluated within this scientistic mode of Laplacean logic. The vast majority of the public are not rationalistic data processing centers that. Certainly, free press in a democracy does function to disclose and disseminate the occurences of factual events, and scientifically disclose the causes, effects and forces that bear on the public's ability to reach political conclusions that serve the democratic society. [7] While this function is significant, it does not penetrate to the heart of the how the free press, vis-à-vis media, constitutes and addresses a public. As Ellul writes in Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes: [...] [E]xcessive data do not enlighten the reader or the listener; they drown him. He cannot remember them all, or coordinate them, or understand them; if he does not want to risk losing his mind, he will merely draw a general picture from them. And the more facts supplied, the more simplistic the image. [8]

It is certainly plausible, that if a public were hypothetically given which was particularly proned to complete scientistic rationality and objectivity in the Laplacean sense, this conception of the "ethic of objectivity" in the media could be effective. Nevertheless, concerns with the capacity for objectivity in the press reaches as far back as the birth of our nation. In a letter to his friend, Thomas Jefferson, six years into his presidency lamented, "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle." [9] Having asserted that the dissemination of information, and the percieved efficacy of this structure which is rooted in Laplacean logic, is not (and certainly is no longer) an accurate understanding of either the function, role or effects of the media and free press in existing democratic states.

Nevertheless, it is legitimately concerning to assert the function of the free press in democracy is not simply the "objective" dissemination of information bearing on the public good. It is on this precise note that Ellul ends his work by addressing the inevitable tendencies in the relationship between media and the democratic state not without a strong hint of cynicism. He writes: But in our time, the conviction of democracy and its claim to inform people collide with the fact that propaganda follows an entirely different mechanism, performs a function entirely different from that of information, and that nowadays facts do not assume reality in the people's eyes unless they are established by propaganda. Propaganda, in fact, creates truth in the sense that it creates in men subject to propaganda all the signs and indications of true believers. [10]

The mechanism of propaganda, as it manifests itself in modern mass democratic societies, has a strong drift toward the propagandistic constitution of political narratives which press upon the public. The public, in turn most easily accepts these as the framework for public discourse and decision-making. But Ellul is not advocating the use of propaganda. Much in the same way that Arendt does, Ellul is most deeply concerned not about those who chose to engage in propaganda, but those who apathetically aquiecse to the nature of its existance. [11] The only truly serious attitude [...] is to show people the extreme effectiveness of the weapon used against them, to rouse them to defend themselves by making them aware of their frailty and their vulnerability, instead of soothing them with the worst illusion, that of a security that neither man's nature nor the techniques of propaganda permit him to possess. [12]

Whether a news outlet accepts (or asserts) this "ethic of objectivity" or not, it is subsumed by the nature of the narrative which they constitute with their reporting and contextualization of the what information is deemed necessary to the public. [13] Publics are constituted by shared narratives, and the communication across those narratives within a democratic society. Media and the free press, are (whether they recognize it or not) disseminators of the propaganda (in the Ellulian sense) which shapes the image which the constituency accepts about the order of society.

For the history of democratic societies, the free press has not been a mechanism intended to disseminate objective, discreet data points, but to build and disseminate competing political narratives within the public sphere. As a result, we are stuck up to this point between two irreconcilabilities with how the role of the free press should look: on one hand, to lean heavily on the "ethic of objectivity" is to leave ourselves in a fragile position capable of being undermined very quickly by targeted propaganda that asserts itself against the plausibility of any objectivity; on the other hand, to lean to heavily on the nihilistic cynicism that everything is propaganda, is to believe to we have all the power, while actually having none at all. I believe that Ellul's very timid, but striking conclusion is the only plausible trajectory where one can end—that the function of the free press in a democracy leans heavily on the consitution of the public and its capacity for developing a sophisticated framework which can parse competing narratives and contextualize data.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism: Introduction By Samantha Power (Schocken, 2004).; see specifically "A Classless Society," p. 407-449, and "The Totalitarian Movement" p. 450-506.

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1973)., see also Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (1964). specifically "Human Techniques," 319-384.

Anthony Lewis, “Democracy and a Free Press: Are They Incompatible?,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 50, no. 5 (1997), 50f.

Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes., 235f: Ellul emphasizes the differences between propaganda use internal to a democratic state, and the internal and external use of totalitarian regimes.

Cf. Linda A Klein, “A Free Press is Necessary for a Strong Democracy: Protecting the First Amendment Protects Our Liberty,” American Bar Association May (2017): "The transparency that journalism brings to events makes government work better, decreases the risk of corruption and ultimately makes our nation safer. Lawyers often use information uncovered by journalists to prosecute wrongdoing, to hold officials accountable, and to rectify injustices;" Wallace, Chris, “The Media is Giving Up Its Place in Our Democracy.” The Washington Post (Online), 2017.: "We are not players in the game. We are umpires, or observers, trying to be objective witnesses to what is going on. That doesn't mean we're stenographers. If the president—or anyone we're covering—says something untrue or does something questionable, we can and should report it." Despite the fact that Wallace seems to be attempting to legitimze the function of the media that President Donald Trump has pointed toward with his discourse, he still falls back on the same Laplacean logic and this "ethic of objectivity."

Pierre-Simon Laplace, Essai Philosophique Sur Les Probabilités (1814).

Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.

Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes., 87; Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (Penguin Group, 1985)., 107: Here, Postman builds on the recasts the basic insight that Ellul is making, but develops how much more insidious these inevitable effects can be when packaged within a medium of entertainment or amusement like television: "[...] [T]elevision is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. [...] It means misleading information—misplaced, ireelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing."

Qtd. in Lewis, (1997), 50.

Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes., 235.

Cf. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism: Introduction By Samantha Power., 467.

Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes., 257,

Patricia. Aufderheide, “Your Country, My Country: How Films About the Iraq War Construct Publics,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 48, no. 2 (2007), 56: "By public, we mean here a group of people mobilized by their common knowledge of common problems, as American philosopher John Dewey used the term in his landmark 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems. Publics, informal networks of people linked by common concerns, are formed by communication with each other about these problems, and their communication is fed by media provision. They create public spheres, to use a term given stature by the work of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Publics are not, in this sense, unitary blocs under the rubric of a nation state or society, but, rather, groups constituted informally around issues or problems."