Natalie Fenton

“Democracy,” wrote John Dewey, “is more than a form of government.” The image we are given of democracy is often reduced to administration, the implementation and management of the necessary, but the legitimacy of the state in democracies is inseparable from some notion of the general will. Democracy, as Rousseau argued, requires some process for the formation of the “general will,” by reference to which decision-making can be measured.

The news is no ordinary product, it is indelibly linked to the practice of democracy. When the product of news is broken, the practice of democracy suffers. The relationship between news and democracy works best when journalists are given the freedom (and resources) to do the job most journalists want to do — to scrutinize, to monitor, hold to account, interrogate power, to facilitate and maintain deliberation. But freedom in this context does not simply mean freedom from censorship and interference from government so frequently associated with the term ‘freedom of the press’; it also means freedom from the constraints and limitations of a thoroughly corporate culture. In neo-liberal democracies the power of the market is just as significant as the power of government.