One and the same newspaper can sometimes not only reveal two or more ideas and visions; but can also expose two different  definitions of what constitutes a newspaper. The words ‘press’ or ‘media’ are used as a catch-all phrase which can apply to very different concepts of what constitutes information and understanding of world affairs.

The word ‘press’ can be a false friend. There is one version which sees it as the task of the press to express common sense, to represent the average view ‑ best characterised by Heidegger’s concept of “Das Sein”, the “big whisper of the world”. It will show up in newspaper content if the press adopts this definition and sets out merely to be the mirror, the reflection of events. Take the Lebanon crisis as an example. If a newspaper is simply a mirror of events then it will voice the old idea that Israel is responsible for war and peace in the world. Exactly as Louis-Ferdinand Céline said in the thirties, in his famous pamphlets, “L'École des cadavres”, “Bagatelles pour un massacre”, “Les beaux draps”.

But there is also a very different concept of the press. I refer to newspapers which see it as their task not just to describe events but also to explain, to analyse, to mediate, to engage in a dialectical process.  In sum: I see two completely different concepts of the press.  Immediacy versus mediation; the mirror versus analysis and deeper understanding.

If you try to go a little deeper, history has a hidden sense. History has a secret, a unique secret.  This is a philosophical concept. And you have a press, which believes that history is unambiguous and that it simply has to find it and to copy it and deliver it to the reader.

And then you have the other press which understands that history is never one, but has multiple versions; that you have ‑ as the Marxists or the disciples of Nietzsche believed in the past ‑ that you have many histories feeding into a mosaic of history. There is the history of the masters and the history of the slaves; the history of the peoples and the history of the enforcers and rulers.  Histories can be turned upside down.  And so on.  Similarly there is a press which believes that its role is to give a voice to these diverse interpretations of history.

Newspaper reporting of terrorism reflects the two approaches to history.  The simplistic approach is to believe in the conspiracy theory.  They believe in the secret actor who has his secret reasons.  Once the plotter is found the conspiracy can be exposed and understood.  The sophisticated approach to terrorism is to understand that there are multiple truths, multiple causes behind terrorism.  The great virtue of a democratic press in Europe and the wider world is that it understands the complexity of events and that newspaper reporting can never reflect one single truth but requires a complex, uncertain building of approximate truths.  It requires an open mind…

In a democracy and with a free press, conflicts and opposite points of view can be exposed.

If you think of the cinema and or of literature each have specific roles.  What do movies show, which no other art can show?  What can literature say, which nothing else can say?  Similarly what the press does, no other form of communication can achieve.

I am not arguing that the definition of a free press is to be the exponent of conflicting points of view or concepts of truth.  But I am emphatic that the free press is an essential pillar of democracy.  Nothing can replace it.  Writers, including such different men as Balzac or Bourdieu or Karl Krauss were also campaigning journalists, who used newspapers as unique instruments to shed light on history. Foucault, of course, but also Jean-Paul Sartre became journalists and wrote some great articles, Hemmingway also and many, so many others: Zola with “J'accuse”, Victor Hugo, with “Choses vues”, Hegel in the Bamberger Zeitung. Karl Marx in his texts for the New York Daily Tribune in the 1860s and in the German newspapers of the late 1840s ‑ all of them saw newspapers as unique campaigning tools.  They recognised that there was no other way of speaking, no other way of expressing, no literature, no philosophy, no way of substituting for the narrative that the press can provide.  The press alone has a very special involvement in events.  It has a proximity to people and situations which nothing can replace.

So, what press does, only the press can do.  And this, for me, is incontrovertible proof.  I had this conversation with two of your colleagues about the future of the press, about blogging, about the internet and that the future of the newspaper was in doubt.