This image purportedly showing Ivanka Trump and Wendi Deng posing with Vladimir Putin is a digital fake. The original, showing them posing instead with film director Baz Luhrmann at a party in 2015, was taken by Hannah Thompson for Vogue.A free media and democracy are inseparable, or so we are told. A complex normative paraphernalia has emerged to describe the key responsibilities placed on media in the emergence and sustenance of democracy: as an independent watchdog and monitor of unchecked power, a tribune of the people, a defender of minorities, a fourth estate and a public sphere.
Free media are said to provide the oxygen, the lubrication or indeed the sinews of a fully functioning and robust democracy.
Yet in those liberal democracies of the west where this vocabulary is most deeply entrenched, we are seeing quite the opposite: a media that all too often preys on the vulnerable and bows down before the powerful; a media whose noble crusade for truth and justice has been replaced by a carnival of gossip and spectacle; a media that demonstrates a commitment to consumer, rather than popular sovereignty; a media that is no longer an outlier but a constitutive part of class rule; a media that has adopted the mantras of the free market rather than the difficult practices involved in ensuring free expression, political participation and democratic renewal.
