Introduction

Abstract

For a citizen to participate in democracy, they must have access to relevant, truthful, and plural information. The social responsibility of the press—a concept introduced in 1947 by the Hutchins Commission—rests on the fundamental right to inform and to be informed. The journalist plays a socially recognized role in the construction of reality. This is a form of “symbolic power”: an “invisible,” “almost magical” power, one that “makes people see and believe, that confirms or transforms the vision of the world and, in this way, action upon the world, and thus the world itself” (Bourdieu, 1989). In the 1990s, Bourdieu (1997) criticized journalists for holding the de facto monopoly over the instruments of large-scale information dissemination, against which cultural producers struggled. Although media products generate “enormous” externalities (Baker, 2004), the journalistic field is subject to the demands of reader and advertiser markets. However, the low autonomy of the journalistic field, denounced by Bourdieu (1997) in the 1990s, has become even more pronounced in the 21st century—a trend accompanied by the growing loss of journalists’ gatekeeping power (control over the flow of information).