The Free Press: Necessary Illusions

Abstract

This article claims that the relevance of the ‘truth argument’ to free speech theory is based on an illusion. According to some critical perspectives this illusion consists in the false belief that a free press is a proper means for the mediation of social reality. The Critique of the Political Economy of the Press attributes it to the modes of production of the press in capitalist systems. Some cultural theorists, on the other hand, claim that the press cannot adequately represent reality because reality is non-representable. Building upon but superseding these approaches, this article affirms that the illusion of the free press is not merely a false idea of what the press really is. The illusion is – in contrast – an epistemological necessity: we need the illusion of a free press in order to retain the belief of a correspondence between the world that appears through the press and that same world as it is in itself.