Journalism's key role in history

Journalism’s key role in history

- Jean-Yves Le Drian

The issue concerns us all – and by “us” I mean the public authorities, political leaders, the leaders of voluntary organizations, media professionals, players in the digital world, researchers, teachers and citizens themselves. In short, everyone who knows that there are

such close ties between information and democracy that neither can exist without the other, and that there can be no democratic life without a public space fuelled by the work of journalists, any more than there can be information without institutions and rules which guarantee its freedom, independence and legitimacy in the eyes of our fellow citizens.

To mention only the case of France, in each of the founding moments of our Republic – and very often they were also moments of crisis, of intense questioning of our democracy’s very meaning –, journalists played a leading role. It was about clarifying the public debate, always with the same demand for reason, indissociable from the

search for autonomy that characterizes modern citizenship. For one major reason: the precondition of autonomy is access to information, so that citizens can freely exercise their judgment.

In these critical times, journalists and press outlets have responded to this need to know and understand. There would have been no Dreyfus Affair, just an innocent man condemned and forgotten by everyone, if Bernard Lazare, true to his idea of journalism, hadn’t been among the first to try to restore the truth by dismantling, point by point, the treason accusation levelled against Captain Dreyfus by the military court.