Chapter 20
The media

The current burning issue regarding the media is how to promote quality analysis and reasoning in contrast to immediate sensationalism, that is, how to support the transition to rationality triggered by the creation of the organizations described in the second part of this book. Indeed, if the Age of Enlightenment viewed education and freedom of the press as the means to allow citizens to fully exercise their social role, the increasing complexity of the world and the development of communication technologies means that today, in relation to the media, we must not only be concerned with freedom of expression, but also with the quality of discourse. Simply opposing viewpoints is no longer enough. Moreover, we should recall that the cornerstone of our social organization is to regularly require all individuals to engage in reasoning that leads to decision-making, and it is therefore highly desirable that the media environment in which they are immersed every day prepares them for this.

An important cultural shift to make is to consider investigative media as a social element that should be funded by the community, just like health or education.

Another important aspect is redefining the duties of the press in today’s social system. To put it simply, we cannot expect traditional politicians to be the sole bulwark against populists. Cognitive dissonance suggests that in a direct confrontation between a traditional politician and a populist, the audience tends to perceive the two symmetrically opposing presentations and may conclude that the truth lies somewhere in between. Through repetition, the populist discourse becomes respectable, and populism can then triumph in elections. The second-round debate of the 2017 French presidential election did indeed lead to the populist's defeat, but only because the candidate was less intellectually sharp than his opponent. It would therefore be dangerous to believe this will necessarily happen again and that it constitutes an effective barrier.
It is the media's responsibility to be the main bulwark against populism, by adopting the following ethical rule, which must be legally enforced to prevent any distortion of competition: every fact reported with a delay must be verified in advance, and in the case of a glaring inaccuracy, the media must bear responsibility. Merely allowing someone else to state the fact does not absolve the media of this responsibility. For live broadcasts, if the journalist knows a fact is inaccurate, they must immediately correct it. If the journalist does not have the necessary information at the moment, it is the media’s responsibility to verify everything that has been broadcast and, in the case of a glaring inaccuracy discovered later, to issue a follow-up correction that reaches at least the same audience as the original misinformation. If an inaccuracy is reported by a person who regularly appears in the media, for example a prominent politician, all subsequent live broadcasts must include a replay of the correction for the previous inaccuracy before proceeding.
To put it differently, we cannot allow factually false elements to become entrenched in our culture simply through the repetition by malicious groups.

Cognitive dissonance requires us to go even further. A statement that conveys only part of reality must be considered grossly inaccurate if it is repeatedly stated, while the other parts of the same reality are not mentioned with the same frequency. Indeed, this constitutes an intentional distortion of reality through repetition. Example: “Immigrants cause problems” hides other aspects of the same reality, such as “Immigrants benefit the economy by occupying the lower rungs of the social ladder, allowing locals to take on more valuable jobs,” or “Immigrants enrich our culture.”
We are not here seeking to impose a form of political correctness aimed at pointing out every occasional linguistic misstep, but rather to assign the media the responsibility of analyzing the content and overall trajectory of the discourse they transmit, identifying intentional repetitions of truncated realities, and putting an end to them by reclassifying them as gross falsehoods whenever they are broadcast outside of a segment that fully addresses the issue at hand.