The Journalist and His Mirror

Media and Information Literacy (MIL) entrusted to journalists poses a structural problem that media sociology has documented: how could those who produce information be its lucid critics? Reflections after attending three hours of training by a journalist.

The Expert’s Position and Its Blind Spots

During a professional training day devoted to media and information literacy, I attended a presentation by a public service journalist on the challenges of MIL in the face of new technologies, particularly Artificial Intelligence. This intervention, which aimed to be pedagogical and informative, seemed to me to reveal with unintentional clarity the mechanisms that Pierre Bourdieu had identified in On Television (1996): the journalist’s lofty position speaking about a field he only partially masters, while presenting himself as a legitimate expert.

What struck me in this presentation was not so much the factual errors and false truths asserted on the subject of Artificial Intelligence, which were numerous, but the underlying epistemological posture. The speaker talked about digital technologies with the assurance of one who knows, even though his experience was limited to an extremely partial and poorly documented point of view. He stated things about technical functioning, social implications, and future developments with a certainty that did not correspond to the actual state of his knowledge. And the audience, composed mainly of teachers, received this speech as authoritative. He could have said “based on my current knowledge, I think that...”, but no, everything was peremptory assertions, so perhaps he himself believed in the truth of it. It was quite chilling, coming from a person whose roles include overseeing journalistic ethics in the organization for which he works.

This scene, mundane in its unfolding, illustrates a phenomenon that could be called the illusion of media transparency. The journalist, because he practices a profession of mediation between reality and the public, ends up believing that he actually accesses reality. He confuses his function—telling stories about the world—with a particular capacity to grasp the truth of that world. This confusion is not an individual accident; it is a structural property of the journalistic field.

Objectivity as Professional Fiction

One of the founding myths of contemporary journalism lies in the notion of objectivity. The journalist presents himself as one who reports facts as they are, keeping his distance from any personal interpretation. Yet, as Roland Barthes already reminded us in his Mythologies (1957), this apparent neutrality constitutes precisely the most effective mask of ideology. Journalistic objectivity is not the absence of a point of view; it is a point of view that ignores itself as such.

Take the example of images. The speaker asserted with conviction that a photographic or video source could be “verified,” that one could distinguish true from false in images. This assertion reveals a profound misunderstanding of the very nature of images. A photograph, whatever its technical authenticity, is always a framing. It is a selection from reality, made by someone, from a certain point of view, at a certain moment. I often use this example: photographing a town hall with or without the homeless person sleeping on its steps produces two images that are equally “true” and respectful of their source, yet tell radically different stories about that town hall, fabricating two opposing images of reality. What is THE reality, or THE truth in this case? Is there only one truth?

This dimension of staging inherent in every image has been known to photography historians for a long time. The Shroud of Turin, often cited as one of the first “photographs” in history, was used for centuries as proof of Christ’s existence, before being revealed as a medieval fabrication. What was irrefutable proof for centuries was merely a fake. Therefore, the mechanical recording of images has never been a guarantee of access to reality. There is always an intention in the act of capture, an orientation in the choice of what is shown and what is hidden.

Paradoxically, it is sometimes the journalists themselves who most pervert the representations they claim to protect. During his presentation, the speaker mentioned the use of AI-generated images in television reports, justified by “aesthetic” considerations and framed by small legal disclaimers. This practice, presented as ethical because accompanied by a warning, contributes precisely to blurring the boundary between reality and its simulation. It would have been better to use drawn images, which would have acknowledged that they are not pretending to be real. Journalists thus fabricate the false reality they denounce elsewhere.

Confirmation Bias as Modus Operandi

Bourdieu, in On Television, described what he called the “circular circulation of information”: journalists first read other journalists, they work in reference to one another, they seek the scoop or angle that will distinguish them from their colleagues while remaining within the perimeter of what is sayable. This informational endogamy produces a paradoxical uniformization: competition that, instead of fostering diversity, generates homogeneity.

This mechanism is accompanied by systematic confirmation bias. Journalists do not so much seek to discover reality as to find sources that corroborate their pre-existing vision of the world. They consider that certain information “does not exist” simply because it does not correspond to their interpretive framework. On technical subjects, such as digital technologies, this bias becomes particularly visible: the speaker asserted that certain data on the energy consumption of artificial intelligences were “not documented,” when in fact they are abundantly available for anyone who takes the trouble to look for them.

This unconscious selection of sources produces what could be called fictive investigation. The journalist believes he is doing investigative work, he has the feeling of revealing something, when he is merely formatting elements that confirm what he already thought. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, in Manufacturing Consent (1988), demonstrated how the economic and political structures of media condition the production of information through five filters: concentration of ownership, dependence on advertising, privileged sources of information, flak and enforcers, and anti-communism. These filters are not a matter of conscious conspiracy, but of a systemic logic that naturally orients information production in the direction of dominant interests.

Judge and Jury in MIL

This analysis leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: journalists are structurally ill-suited to provide media literacy education. Not because of their individual bad faith—many are sincerely convinced they serve the public interest—but because of their position in the field. They are judge and jury. They must train people to critique a system of which they are the producers and symbolic beneficiaries. Others, however, know full well that they are lying, but because of their position of dominance, think it is for a good cause, as historian David Colon explains very well in Propaganda: Mass Manipulation in the Contemporary World (2019).

The philosopher Jacques Rancière, in The Emancipated Spectator (2008), had already criticized this pedagogical posture that presupposes the inequality it claims to combat. The master who wants to emancipate the ignorant begins by affirming his position as one who knows; he deepens the gap he claims to want to bridge. Similarly, the journalist who claims to teach students to “decode information” immediately positions himself as one who knows how to decode, who possesses codes that others do not have.

This journalist perfectly illustrated this posture during the training day. He presented his profession in a corporatist manner, as an activity of general interest requiring specific skills that only professionals would possess. He stated that “those who know” are journalists, academics, and state bodies, thus designating the official sources of legitimacy while associating himself with them. Yet the State is not a neutral arbiter of truth (or in George Orwell’s 1984, with the Ministry of Truth). Saying this is, in my view, an enormity. The State defends a point of view on the world that corresponds to the interests it carries—this is obvious, and one does not need much critical thinking to know it. I do not mean that the State is nothing but lies (although many politicians say exactly this after leaving “public affairs”)—I do not think so—but taking into account that the speech of power is situated, oriented according to a policy, is its very purpose, and this is the starting point of what ethnology tells us. To my knowledge, ethnologists are not “conspiracy theorists”! The leaders of public media are appointed by elected officials. To believe in total independence of journalism from power is naivety, bad faith, or conscious lying.

The assertion that public service would be exempt from audience rating logic constitutes another illusion that this speaker maintained. Studies on television practices show that all channels, including those reputed to be cultural, are subject to the pressure of audience figures. This pressure determines editorial choices, formats, and topics covered. To deny this reality is to participate in constructing an idealized image of journalism that precisely prevents the lucid critique that MIL should enable.

Toward Image Education Rather Than Media Education

Faced with these rather harsh judgments on my part, what alternative do I propose? For several years, I have defended a different approach, centered on image education rather than media education. This distinction is not merely terminological; it engages a radically different epistemological posture.

Media education, as it is generally practiced, presupposes that there are true and false pieces of information, reliable and dubious sources, and that the educator’s role is to transmit the criteria for distinguishing one from the other. This approach, despite its laudable intentions, perpetuates the logic of domination it claims to combat. It maintains a hierarchy between those who know (journalists, institutions) and those who must learn (the public, students).

Image education starts from a different premise: every image is a construction. There is no “objective” image that would be a transparent reflection of reality. Therefore, the question is no longer to distinguish true from false, but to understand how images are made, by whom, for what purpose, from what position. This approach, which is part of the tradition of Cultural Studies and the philosophy of the image, allows for a genuine emancipation of the gaze. It does not say “here is what you must believe”; it says “here is how to look at what you are shown.”

Concretely, this means going through practice. In the workshops I lead with students or adults, we make images. We write scripts, we film, we edit. This production experience demystifies the media process far more effectively than any course on “source verification.” When you have yourself decided where to place the camera, what to keep in editing, what music to add, what voice-over to write—which can radically change the meaning of the image—you intuitively understand that every image is the result of a series of choices. Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), reminded us that “no one educates anyone, no one educates himself alone, human beings educate each other, mediated by the world”. This sentence summarizes the spirit of my workshops: it is not about transmitting established knowledge about media, but about creating the conditions for a personal and collective elaboration of critical thinking.

The Democratic Stakes of the Critical Position

The stakes of this reflection go far beyond the school framework of MIL. They touch on the fundamental question of democratic functioning. As Bourdieu emphasized, journalism exercises a power of consecration: it decides what is visible and what remains invisible, what deserves to be said and what can be silenced. This power, which is often exercised unconsciously, has considerable political effects. And fortunately, since Bourdieu’s time, social networks have arrived, opening up the possibility of public speech for citizens. I do not mean they are perfect, but they are a space for democratic expression. Journalists discredit them because they believe their profession is threatened, precisely by democratic expression. They thus reveal their bias of domination.

The philosopher Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, in Philosophy of Images (2001), reminded us that the image forces us to think about a dual nature, made of a paradoxical combination of Same and Other. An image that resembles too closely what it represents makes us forget that it is an image; an image that strays too far from it loses its representative function. It is in this in-between that the question of truth in the media regime is played out.

Training citizens capable of navigating this in-between cannot be the mission of those who produce dominant images. This does not mean that journalists should be excluded from any educational role, but that their place must be rethought. They can testify to their practice, explain their constraints, show their hesitations. But they absolutely cannot claim to teach the truth about the information they produce.

Cultural democracy, as defined by the Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights (2007), implies recognizing that each person possesses a capacity for judgment and creation. Young people who practice TikTok, whom adults most often view with condescension, develop skills in staging, narration, and critical reading of visual codes. These skills, acquired through practice and peer sharing, perhaps constitute a form of image education more effective than many institutional arrangements.

The issue, ultimately, is not to train savvy consumers of information, but conscious producers of images. Not spectators who would know how to distinguish true from false according to criteria transmitted by those who know, but actors capable of understanding, through their own experience, how representations of the world are constructed. Only on this condition can media literacy fulfill its democratic promises.

The Paradox of Shared Hallucination

One final reflection comes to mind, inspired by contemporary debates on artificial intelligence. The journalist speaker at this training day mentioned the “hallucinations” of AI systems as a major flaw disqualifying these tools as sources of information. This term hallucination, borrowed from psychiatry, designates cases where the system produces false information with the appearance of certainty.

Yet what neuroscience teaches us about how the human brain works should make us more humble. Our perception of the world is itself a permanent reconstruction. What we see is not reality; it is a model that our brain constructs from partial signals. We too “hallucinate” constantly. We fill in gaps, we interpret ambiguities, we project our expectations onto what we perceive. One can experience this at will, by asking several people present at the same place at the same time to recount it afterward—the diversity is always surprising! Some people may assert that someone was there, for example, while others assert the opposite. This is a subject well known to courts of law.

This analogy is not a joke. It points to a reality that journalists, in their claim to objectivity, struggle to recognize: direct access to reality is an illusion. All knowledge is mediated, constructed, situated. False information has always existed, long before social networks and artificial intelligences. What is changing is not the nature of the phenomenon but the scale and speed of circulation.

Recognizing this reality does not mean sinking into relativism. One can maintain demands for rigor, verification, and confrontation of sources, while accepting that these operations never guarantee transparent access to truth. It is precisely this epistemological humility that is too often lacking in discourses on MIL. By claiming to transmit tools for distinguishing true from false, we maintain a dangerous fiction: that of a world where truth would be accessible to whoever possesses the right methods.

A truly emancipatory media education should begin with this recognition: we are all, journalists included, producers of partial and situated representations. The question is not who holds the truth, but how we can, together, construct a plurality of perspectives that enriches our understanding of the world. This perspective, which is part of the tradition of cultural rights and cultural democracy, remains largely absent from institutional MIL frameworks. It is time to introduce it.