The hot topic of the moment concerning the media is how to promote quality analysis and reasoning in relation to immediate sensationalism, that is to say how to support the shift towards reason caused by the creation of the organizations described in the second part of this book. Indeed, if the Age of Enlightenment considered education and freedom of the press as the means to allow citizens to access the full exercise of their social role, the complexity of the world and the increase in communications technologies make that at the media level, it is appropriate today to be interested not only in freedom of expression, but also in the quality of speech. Opposing opinions is no longer enough. Let us also remember that the keystone of our social organization being to regularly subject all individuals to the development of reasoning leading to a decision, it appears highly desirable that the media environment in which they are immersed on a daily basis prepares them for this.
An important cultural shift to make is to consider that investigative media have become a social element to be financed by the community, in the same way as health or education.
The other important element is to redefine the duties of the press in the current social system. Simply put, we cannot ask classic politicians to be the only shield against populists. Cognitive dissonance tells us that in a direct confrontation between a classic politician and a populist, listeners will tend to oppose the two presentations proposed in a symmetrical way, therefore to consider that the truth could well be between the two, which means that through repetition, populist discourse becomes respectable, and populism can then triumph in electoral votes. The debate in the second round of the 2017 French presidential election certainly led to the defeat of the populist, but it was because the candidate was less intellectually brilliant than his opponent, so it would be dangerous to believe that this will be repeated, and therefore that this constitutes an effective barrier.
It is up to the media to be the main shield against populism, by adopting the following ethical rule, which must be secured by law to avoid any distortion of competition: any fact reported deferred must must be verified beforehand, so in the event of gross inaccuracy, the media must be held liable. Having a third party say the fact is not enough to relieve the media of this responsibility. For live broadcasts, if the journalist knows the inaccuracy of the fact, he has the duty to speak again immediately to correct it. If it does not have the elements at its disposal at the moment, it is up to the media to verify a posteriori everything that has been broadcast, therefore in the event of gross inaccuracy discovered a posteriori, to broadcast a subsequent correction which benefits from at least the same audience as the initial disinformation. In the case of an inaccurate fact reported by a person who speaks regularly in the media, for example a leading politician, any subsequent live broadcast must be preceded by the rebroadcast of the sequence correcting the previous inaccuracy.
In other words, we cannot allow factually false elements to impose themselves in our culture just through the accumulation of repetitions by malicious groups.
Cognitive dissonance requires us to go even further. A sentence which conveys only part of reality must be considered grossly inaccurate when it is repeated regularly while the other parts of the same reality are not repeated in the same proportions. Indeed, this aims to intentionally establish through repetition a distortion of reality. Example: “Immigrants pose problems” which hides other sides of the same reality which are for example “Immigrants are beneficial for the economy because they occupy the bottom of the social ladder and allow locals to occupy jobs. more rewarding positions” or “Immigrants enrich our culture”.
We are not seeking here to establish a political correctness which would aim to highlight any occasional awkwardness of language, but rather to assign to the media the responsibility of analyzing as a whole and over time the discourse they convey, of y detect intentional repetitions of a truncated reality, and put an end to them by reclassifying them as crude falsehoods each time they are broadcast outside of a sequence which addresses the entire issue.