So then, on 20 January, the unthinkable will irrevocably become reality: the United States will have a new president in Donald Trump. Among those invited to attend the festivities that will follow the swearing in, there will be no Meryl Streep, no representatives of the American cultural elite and none of the great intellectual figures of the country or from elsewhere around the globe. For this, the 45th President of the United States could not give a fig, his focus is on the “people”, the good people of America, like his 18.9 million Twitter followers whom he will continue to swamp with messages of self-praise, his recipes for making America great again, and the fibs and lies that have bought him his recent political success.
Was this candidate who hijacked and draped himself in the colours of the Republican party helped in achieving his goal by agencies working on behalf of the Kremlin? Some are saying so openly, namely the US intelligence services having elected this time to play the transparency, rather than the secrecy, card. Not that it did them much good as Donald Trump disdainfully dismissed them, going as far as to appear to give less credence to the intelligence community whose task it will be to keep him informed day-by-day over the next four years than confidence in President Putin and his “intelligence”. Here is clear proof that the Trump presidency will be marked by uncertainty and also an indication of the extent to which the world has now entered a period where information is proving to be dangerously changeable.
Let us not be naïve: information has always been coveted by all who aspire to or hold power. Propaganda directed outside a country’s borders has always been a weapon available to those who sought to influence their environment. Today, institutional communication has become nothing more than the soft version of propaganda for domestic consumption – and it is worth noting the extent to which the Commission has, in but a few years, yielded to this temptation, trying to put into effect in its own way the “old dream of heads of state and/or government” as described by journalist Sylvie Kauffmann in Le Monde of 8-9 January: “speaking directly to the electorate, with no intermediaries, no questions confusing the message”. For the people and departments who have been assigned this task, tools such as those offered by the internet, from social networks to YouTube and Twitter, have been a godsend. The problem is that the information churned out has turned out, in reality, to be that of the apprentice sorcerers struggling to control the demons that it spawns and feeds.
Clearly institutional, including European, communication is of only relative efficiency, for the most part, affecting no more than its target group of experts and those who need to know. Sometimes, however, its audience is wider but this is often to its cost. Information worthy of the name will always require a mediator, action by a journalist who ensures scrupulous application of the basic rules of this profession, so succinctly summed up by Emanuele Gazzo, the first editor in chief of Agence Europe, many years ago: “The press is largely responsible for forming and giving expression to that mysterious thing that we call ‘public opinion’. Being mindful of that responsibility is, for a journalist, a primary duty in the same way as being truthful and not omitting anything that can help the understanding of the truth”. Whether governments and institutions like it or not, journalists must always remain meddlesome and bothersome to those who simply want to be left in peace to get on with communicating, so that information – real information, that has been checked, confirmed by at least a second source, then set in its context before being analysed – can retain its reputation and continue to be useful in society.
Some rightly may argue that the press is no longer able to deliver on the high demands of its role. It is true that quality newspapers are now small islets in a sea of mediocrity where all that stands out are sheets inspired everywhere to the point of nausea by the tabloids. Into this, pour the bile and bitterness of the good peoples of Europe with the regularity and effectiveness of the drip, drip, drip of Chinese torture, every day further convincing readers that this Europe – “Brussels” – is something that cannot be stomached. The social network forums allow the outpouring of conspiracy theories - wildly fanciful false information, which, by dint of being hawked, become true in the minds of those who through their naivety become complicit in subversion. Nor may the news programmes on our major television channels be relied upon to set things straight: most of the time, they talk about the European dimension only when there is a crisis (thus the image presented of Europe is systematically negative) or to say how valiantly the president or head of government had fought in the European Council to defend national interests. Under conditions such as these, how could the EU win the information war? (Original version in French by Michel Theys)