Information: An Additional Weapon of Politics

Already in the early morning after the vote tally essentially demonstrated the heavy bruising that Obama endured during the midterm elections, the White House staff was urgently convened with only one point to discuss: how to improve modes of presenting the president’s policy. In media-saturated democracies, communicating is more important than governing; thus, controlling the press — or rather, the capacity to influence its work — is worth more than any act of government.

The freedom of the press thus becomes the true field of conflict between political forces, because that freedom not only permits the production of news streams but also constructs cognitive structures. And if [Italian] General Carlo Jean says without circumlocution that “today, information is the most powerful weapon that the armies have,” it means that in every area in the life of a country — even in that of the military — to control journalism means to control knowledge, and it’s knowledge that then builds consensus.

In the past, rankings of press freedom have singled out dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. Whether it’s “Reporters sans Frontières” or “Freedom House,” they seemed to be instruments of pressure from international public opinion versus those countries in Africa, Asia [and] the Middle East, where journalists were killed or were beaten in jail or were simply officials accommodating the will of their governments. Then, from when the centrality of information became a diffused awareness of each society, the attention always moved itself more toward the democracies where — even if the laws defend the freedom of the press — in reality, the governing parties often practice forms of violation of these same laws. They may tolerate, like in Russia, for example, a violent and aggressive climate toward the assassination of inconvenient journalists, or even maneuvering with the professional wisdom of “spin doctors” — such as in the United States, in order to launch the war against Saddam’s Iraq — in order to make journalism an instrument supporting the choices of the government.

Also, Italy naturally finds itself in this critical territory of every democracy, and the specificity of its media system, with politicians’ extended control on the ownership of the media, explains without additional emphasis the reason why Italy’s ranking (49th place) is the worst in the Western world. Resting in the background is the open horizon of the Internet, a place where freedom and adventure marry with much ambiguity. Distrusting the conventional practices of journalism, governments already study it, with much interest, while “Reporters sans Frontières” and “Freedom House” watch and denounce.