French President Emmanuel Macron meets Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, during the 'Choose France' summit at Versailles January 22, 2018. Christian Liewig/PA Images. All rights reserved.If we compare humankind’s present situation with the not-too-distant past, the many profound changes that have taken place encourage a degree of optimism despite continuing dangers – especially to the environment. In the past 30 years, extreme poverty has fallen by two thirds, 2 billion people have been saved from malnutrition, maternal and infant mortality has been halved and, even if certain tragedies continue to be appalling, armed conflicts are less and less deadly. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the democratic model became widely “democratized.” And yet a spectre haunts our societies, that of modern despotism – of “authoritarian strongmen” – in other words, the spectre of democratic frailty.
There is a crisis of confidence in institutions and media, a crisis in the portrayal of reality.
Between the two world wars, the US essayist Walter Lippmann wrote that “in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis of journalism.” This is true nearly a century later. There is a crisis of confidence in institutions and media, a crisis in the portrayal of reality (as polls about conspiracy theories show), a weakening of the media’s economic model that is threatening the quality of journalistic content, a fragmenting of the public domain under the impact of “filter bubbles,” and there is domination by technology firms that praise transparency without applying it to themselves or their algorithms.
