Valdai Papers

Special Issue

Reviving a Species.
Why Russia needs a renaissance of
professional journalism
Andrei Bystritsky

Reviving a Species. Why Russia needs a renaissance of professional journalism

Citizen journalism vs. professional journalism: Who

influences societys self-awareness?
We are living in a world of communication abundance, as numerous studies on the media bear out.
Many people today probably find it hard to image a time when it could be difficult to get hold of a text
or a photograph, or to check a quotation or reference. All you need today is a search engine and a
little patience.
This ease has given rise to an illusion that the almost billion-strong community of Internet users can
replace professional journalism. There are millions of diverse outlets on the Internet, offering
everything one could need: court rulings, statements by non-governmental organizations, human
rights and corruption reports, etc. As such, we often hear that an era of digital democracy is upon us
that the electronic communication abundance will generate unprecedented forms of public
oversight of government, and that the myriads of ordinary but active Internet users will create a brave
new world, where there is no place for miscreants and criminals to hide from embarrassing
revelations.
A victim of molestation at a provincial church may expose the priest from time to time, but oddly
enough the scandal hardly affects the Catholic Church at all. And thats because the belief in the
curative properties of communications is based on the illusion that mankind is guided by the light of
truth. But what if the light of truth only succeeds in horrifying mankind? If teachers kept opening
childrens eyes to the naked truth the fact that man is a loathsome creature inclined to all kinds of
vices the education process would grind to a halt.
In other words, the emergence of millions of online actors with their own accounts and ideas has
upended the comparatively harmonious picture of the world, which was only recently created by a
fairly limited number of professional journalists, leaving in its place chaotic Brownian information
motion.
I will go so far as to predict that even hundreds of millions of potential citizen journalists will at
best have no influence at all on the world and at worst will only magnify mankinds inherent
shortcomings.
While I dont intend to idealize professional journalism, the fact is that journalists still follow
editorial logic and a hierarchy of editorial decision-making. Hierarchy is the basis of culture, and
culture is the only thing (apart from naked fear) that keeps us from indulging in an endless cycle of
violence and revenge information violence in this case which human nature is so susceptible to.
It is another matter that today both professional journalists and their citizen counterparts exist in a
relatively new information and communication environment that has brought many unexpected
things. Some people believe that the communication abundance has radically changed the status quo.
But is this true?

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Reviving a Species. Why Russia needs a renaissance of professional journalism

Here is John Keane, the author of Democracy and Media Decadence and a serious scholar of the
interplay between communications and social order, on this question: It is often forgotten that the
changes that are going on have been driven by a variety of technical causes and human causers
including radical alterations to the ecology of public affairs reporting and commentary... professional
news journalism is now just one of many different types of power-scrutinizing institutions.
Keane identifies several spheres where the consequences of communication abundance have been felt
most strongly. Of these, the democratization of information is the most important. In a sense, this is
an uncontroversial point, as access to information has indeed been radically simplified. But the
consequences of the democratization of information are not quite so clear-cut. While this process
should lead to multitudes of people participating in discussions and decision-making as well as to a
shocking degree of openness, it is more likely, in my opinion, to result in information chaos,
confusion and, strangely enough, even greater atomization of society. The amount of general
knowledge is shrinking rather than expanding. Mankind is becoming fragmented, and as people seek
out new identities, they begin creating new communities, or reviving old, archaic ones. The latter
tends to be a more spontaneous process.
Companies like Google and social media are a response of sorts to the democratization of
information. In effect, they are attempting to organize information and communication, and enable
billions of people to rationally structure both their relationships and their consumption and
dissemination of information on the Internet. But the success of these ventures is causing serious
doubts: true, they have incredibly high capitalization levels, but there is not the slightest shred of
evidence that they orderly arrange information. On the contrary, what we see is the snowballing of
information. This helps explain the dispute between the European Commission and Google, for
example. It is a dispute between the two types of monopolies private and ostensibly public. Google
wants to do it all, to improve peoples lives by giving them access to databases, libraries, etc. But the
European Commission, which formally claims to favor access to resources by other organizers of
knowledge, essentially wants to retain its regulatory role and place Internet operators under its
supervision.
Yet another circumstance is the seeming expansion of public oversight. Indeed, anyone is free to post
almost anything on the Internet, and it only takes one inopportune photograph of an intoxicated MP
to cost him his career. Non-governmental organizations have become much more powerful. Now they
can disseminate information without any hindrance, and the ability of the public to access this
information contributes to what seems at first sight to be the unprecedented efficiency of
organizations like Transparency International and Doctors Without Borders. But even cursory
observation will show that both public oversight as a whole and non-governmental organizations in
particular have not made much progress. Whats more, now they can be easily waved away simply by
avoiding their websites or unsubscribing unpleasant or unwelcome news about real or imagined
government abuses on Facebook. Some thirty years ago, however, the impact of reports presented by
such organizations was amplified by traditional media.
The relationship between privacy and publicity merits separate consideration. Clearly, we have
approached a state resembling village life in the recent past, where children slept on the same strawcovered surface side as their parents, and the life of farm animals in all its nakedness served as an

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Reviving a Species. Why Russia needs a renaissance of professional journalism

object lesson. In the final analysis, Longus Daphnis and Chloe was the elegant Hellenistic fantasy of
an aesthete who wished to escape from the harsh and rather obscene facts of life. The tradition of
privacy that asserted itself over the last 150 years has been ruined and no longer exists either for
public personalities or ordinary people who may believe that their private lives are no less interesting
than the life of celebrities. It is amusing to consider that individuals today enjoy much less security in
the current information and communication environment than a member of the underground in
Nazi-occupied areas of Russia during World War II. Even though some people believe that this
boundless and occasionally voluntary openness is leading us toward the triumph of digital
democracy, it seems to me that as the result well see nothing but an orgy of unbridled mob passions.
A striking example is the widespread phenomenon of personal data theft.
But digital democracy is not just a meaningless phrase. It even seems to be possible. For example,
there is a widespread belief that chaotic churn of the digital environment creates entire institutions
out of popular individuals, who essentially constitute a new, unelected class of representatives. The
Gracchi brothers were representatives of this kind, but it was much more difficult for them to
communicate with their audience than present-day activists. True, there are serious doubts as to
whether the Internet is responsible for the popularity of Boko Harams leaders. I, for one, believe
that they caught the public eye with their wanton cruelty, but the Internet is part of the story all the
same. For now, digital democracy is just a dream, albeit not a bad one. After all, what could be bad
about ordinary people regularly participating in governance and decision-making? But so far all it has
yielded is an endless stream of complaints and verbal abuse.
Two more factors should be taken into consideration as well: the Internets lack of borders and
spying, which is generally referred to as monitoring. The lack of borders is truly amazing. There
seems to be no physical barriers to the spread of information, except perhaps language barriers.
There is a reason to believe that, eventually, we will be able to overcome the curse of the Tower of
Babel. However, it is interesting to note that, despite the rapid development of electronic
communications, the lack of borders only manifests itself in the technical ability to deploy servers in
any part of the world, not in the emergence of an infinitely communicating community. The same
goes for monitoring. For all its technical lightness, information behavior has failed to acquire any
additional integrity or consistency, while the amazing capability of technological monitoring has
promoted voyeurism more than anything else.
These new elements of communication abundance have created an incredibly impressionistic
information picture of the modern world. It is a motley and chaotic picture, in which abundance turns
out to be a kind of curse akin to the Midas touch, making rubbish valuable and devaluing really
important information by drowning it in a flood of meaningless chatter.
We must also consider the contradiction between meaning and effect in the message. But before we
take up this topic, let me say a few words about the dynamics at play in the world.
The events of recent months, mostly those related to Ukraine, have demonstrated the depth of the
present crisis. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book, The End of History, in which he
argued that after the disintegration of the USSR, history understood as a battle between light and
darkness, democracy and totalitarianism had come to an end. There were no obstacles to the

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Reviving a Species. Why Russia needs a renaissance of professional journalism

triumphant procession of freedom and democracy, he claimed, and a new stage in world development
would begin after a brief hiatus. Today it is clear that Fukuyamas theory was a spectacular failure.
Instead, the collapse of the bipolar political system in the post-Cold War era encouraged billions of
people to create their own countries, communities, etc., but this process broke down within a very
brief historical period. The Arab Spring, the Maidan in Kiev, and clashes on Taksim Square in Turkey
are similar in that they are all episodes in the transformation of the old world into something new.
At the same time, the involvement of the masses in the process of social and political creativity has
led to what can be considered a change of the world historical order and development paradigm. The
most important thing in this context is the transformation of what are commonly considered liberal
values. These values have resulted from the long, complex and sometimes tragic evolution of JudeoChristian civilization. Until quite recently, it was assumed that these values human rights, minority
rights, democracy, freedom, etc. were intrinsic to human nature and that people left to their own
devices would naturally gravitate toward them. Whereas now there is no doubt whatsoever that these
values are the epitome of all that is aggressive and cruel in human nature. Its simply that before the
1990s these values were under systemic attack from the official communist ideology that sought to
transform them in its own way by placing them within a matrix of collective non-freedom. In the
1990s, an illusion was created that these values were no longer under threat from any quarter. At any
rate, many people, including Fukuyama, seemed to believe this.
It is rather funny to recall how the European Broadcasting Union warned the VGTRK (Russian
Television and Radio Broadcasting Corporation) in the 1990s that Tatu, a Russian teenage singing
duo, should observe conventions and avoid overt displays of homosexuality on stage during the
Eurovision contest. In 2014, that same Eurovision insisted that the rights of sexual minorities be
protected.
In the same period, huge numbers of people from the former USSR, the Middle East, the Far East,
and the Maghreb began to participate meaningfully in political life. These people were inspired by
liberal values, although their conception of what constitutes liberal values differed.
The history of Russia at the turn of the 20th century makes for the simplest point of comparison with
the current situation in the world. I will note the five most important similarities. First, the
traditional patriarchal society had collapsed. This is happening in the Islamic world today, and it is
happening again in the post-Soviet space, in part due to the collapse of the paternalistic communist
society. Second, a relatively large number of young people lack any kind of economic, social, or
cultural security. In present-day Cairo, as in the suburbs of St. Petersburg at the time, one can see
crowds of restless young people. Third, there is a large group of half-educated intelligentsia, who are
sufficiently radical and nihilistic to recklessly attack the existing order. Fourth, capital is highly
concentrated in the hands of people who in their heart of hearts are not sure that they have the right
to it. We can compare, for example, Savva Morozov (the late 19th century Russian millionaire and
philanthropist. Ed.) and the Bin Laden family, who, by making donations willingly, were digging
their own graves. Fifth, simplified liberal values find their consummate expression in the crude desire
for justice and equality and the demand that they be delivered immediately and in their most notional
and radical form.

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Reviving a Species. Why Russia needs a renaissance of professional journalism

All of this is accompanied by extreme envy of the prosperous West and contempt for its already
refined liberal values, which are regarded as a sign of effeminacy and weakness.
This dangerous cocktail combining the availability of large numbers of people to use as cannon
fodder, a crude ideology of equality and forced justice, and money from frustrated rich men is
turning the world into a battlefield, both in reality and in the heads of a lot of people, including in the
West itself.
Thus, what is happening in the world can be interpreted as a global civil war similar to the civil war
that raged in Russia in the early 20th century. It is online warfare waged with the use of modern
communications system, and therefore I interpret it as a series of episodes, from comparatively
peaceful protests to really brutal ones like in Egypt or Ukraine, rather than a relatively brief clash of
opposing forces.
To get back to the issue of journalism, the problem, as I see it, is that professional journalism is a
journalism of meaning, while millions of bloggers and other producers and consumers of information
are aimed at achieving an effect.
As Kenneth Boulding writes in his book The Image, The meaning of a message is the change which it
produces in the image.
The focus on effect rather than meaning is the main change that has occurred in our electrified age,
for the effect spreads over the whole situation and not just on any one level of information.
What we need is a renaissance of real journalism competent, independent, balanced, based on facts
and reality, and detached in general, the kind of journalism that took shape in the 20th century.
Introduced by Giorgio Vasari, the concept of renaissance implies a certain loss. There can be no
revival or renovation of something that was not lost in the first place. European journalism and the
world communications system in general have lost a lot recently, in part because communications in
general and journalism in particular are reflecting an ongoing social change.
This mass exchange of information involves tens of millions of people incessantly writing or
producing something. As a result, it is absolutely impossible to make heads or tails of what is going
on in the world, particularly given the political biases of prosumers (simultaneous producers and
consumers of information) and the constant clashing between them. Moreover, it is entirely clear that
a portion of the worlds professional media today is politically biased.
My assertion that we need a renaissance of journalism is confirmed by numerous recent studies. For
example, 52% of respondents in a Eurobarometer poll believe that radio is the most integrating
medium in Europe. The consumption of public media is growing. It is high time we realized that
journalism honest, competent and reliable is needed for the survival of civilized society. The key
problem is the reliability of information.
A kind of revolt of the masses has occurred in the communications sphere. Like any revolt, it has both
positive and negative aspects. The positive certainly includes the relative ease of accessing all sorts of

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Reviving a Species. Why Russia needs a renaissance of professional journalism

data and mass mobilization. The main negative is the dramatic decline in reliable information, which
fans the flames of the global civil war I mentioned earlier.
Mankind is like Dante in need of a Virgil to guide it through the information labyrinths of the modern
world. In fact, after a brief period of confusion caused by the snowballing of Internet users, the
professional media have been transformed. They have learned how to take advantage of the new
opportunities to offer high-quality products to their audiences.
What does an ordinary Internet user do? He wanders from site to site, his glance often lingering on
notable details and following hyperlinks. It is like random motion. Even if the user is looking for
specific information for example, about the Decembrists he will make a lot of motions and spend
a lot of time only to end up with a random selection of data. Meanwhile, Nathan Eidelmans books
could provide the reader with good information presented in a fascinating way. Well, the modern
professional media are a collective Eidelman capable of offering a logical and well-developed
concept of knowledge, including knowledge about what is going on in the world.
Unlike unorganized Internet users, professional media are made up of well-disciplined and united
communities capable of conforming to standards of journalism. They can, for example, separate fact
from commentary, and check the reliability of their sources.
The journalistic renaissance has to be about returning to standards of professional journalism and
realizing that todays world is dependent on the professional media to a much greater extent than
ever before.
The political turbulence in the world, amplified by communication abundance, calls for a new
information dissemination hierarchy based on standards of honesty.

About the author:

Andrei Bystritsky, Dean of the Faculty of Communications, Media and Design, the National
Research University Higher School of Economics, Chairman of the Council, Foundation for
Development and Support of the Valdai Discussion Club.

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