This blog comes from our Impress Insights newsletter! If you want to be the first to hear the latest analysis and opinions from industry experts, you can sign up here! 

As much academic research bears testimony to, our systems of media and communications constitute the key structures, forms and technologies that enable meaning-making, legitimate decision-making, sustain consent and occasionally give cause for uprisings.

In this manner, our systems of media and communications have long been heralded as vital to democracy. Yet while the relationship between media and democracy is repeatedly asserted it is rarely interrogated in full. Consequently, too often the very concept of democracy and the notion of ‘free media’ fall back on framings that have themselves been established (and frequently distorted) by dominant media and communication forms.

We can trace a similar pattern in the ways in which much of the UK’s news media have long insisted on peddling the belief that they are (in their current forms) one of democracy’s vital organs and without them, democracy (in its current form) will cease to function, despite a well-documented history of distortions, misrepresentations, illegal practices and evidence of a lack of accountability. Similarly, celebrations of ‘free speech’ on social media platforms by the likes of Elon Musk, evade how opening up a platform to fascists and white supremacists may result in the empowering of some but the oppression of others to the detriment of democracy.

Where notions of democratic gains are so glibly applied yet mean little in practice, democracy itself loses purchase. Where forms of liberal democracy have existed, they are now deemed to be dying or at least to be on the doomed path of a drawn-out demise, a demise that many forms of media have enabled while heralding themselves as democracy’s saviour. Some commentators have gone so far as to state that we are now in a condition of post-democracy; a condition that our systems of media and communications are complicit in.

As politics has morphed into spectacle and decisions are made elsewhere, so our media thrives on sensationalism and feeds off clickbait, channelling our attention to celebrity politicians and affirming sound bite culture. As authoritarian forms of government emerge and hold on to power and far-right parties gain in popularity in many places around the world, so digital media fragments debate, fosters extremism and contributes to the catastrophic loss of accountable knowledge.

As political responses to climate catastrophe fail dismally in their reach and ambition, so our media focus on ‘natural’ disasters that shock but rarely explain the complexities of Western imperialism, the enduring power of the fossil fuel industry and its command over governmental politics around the world, while techno-solutionism becomes the norm (captured by the very forces of profit mongering that have caused many of the problems in the first place).

My new book addresses many of these debates but then goes a step further to ask what would constitute democratic media and communications systems that work for a just and transformative democracy? What would it mean to conceive of our systems of media and communications in terms of the public good rather than private gain? How could a more egalitarian imagination recast participation, decentralise media and tech power, and produce more collaborative forms of public knowledge designed for communicative justice?

Imagining alternatives to our dominant systems of media and communications that have, so far, failed democracy, may also help us to conceive of how democracy itself could be democratised. Because thinking about how we may decentralise media and communications practices and (infra)structures also involves thinking about how we decentralise economic and political power more generally for transformative ends.

By Natalie Fenton
Author and Lecturer

Natalie Fenton’s latest book Democratic Delusions: How the media hollow out democracy and what we can do about it is available to purchase now!

About Natalie

Natalie Fenton is a Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London where she is also Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. She was Vice-chair of the Board of the campaign group Hacked Off for 7 years and is a founding member and former Chair of the UK Media Reform Coalition. She is also on the Board of Declassified UK an investigative journalism website for in-depth analysis on British foreign policy.  Her books include New Media: Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age (Sage, 2010); Misunderstanding the Internet2nd Edition co-authored with James Curran and Des Freedman (Routledge, 2016); Digital, Political, Radical (2016, Polity); Media, Democracy and Social Change: Re-imagining Political Communications co-authored with Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany and Aeron Davis (Sage, 2020) and The Media Manifesto co-authored with Des Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and Lina Dencik (Polity, 2020); and Democratic Delusions: How the media hollowed out democracy and what we can do about it (Polity, 2024).

About Impress 

Impress is a champion for news that can be trusted. We are here to make sure news providers can publish with integrity; and the public can engage in an ever-changing media landscape with confidence. We set the highest regulatory standards for news, offer education to help people make informed choices and provide resolution when disputes arise. 

Media enquiries

Louie Chandler: louie@impressorg.com / 02033076778