WS15 – Journalists and the media

In partnership with :

École Supérieure de Journalisme (ESJ) de Lille : www.esj-lille.fr (english version)
Alliance Internationale des Journalistes (International Alliance of Journalists) : www.alliance-journalistes.net

Workshop presentation

The « power of the media » is a conventional representation. So is the idea of a « society of information » in Chinese and European societies, in which television is the most popular and most intimate form in each household, where the media model daily life as well as vision of the world. Because of their significance and impact, the media necessarily maintain intimate and complex relationships as much with the economic power as the political authorities. These relationships seek to assert an independence capable both of guaranteeing credibility and to making things subject to their objectives.

Journalists, in their most varied forms ranging from the key editorialist and star newscaster to the multitude of small fry and drudges with no job security, embody the media. But these latter have been radically transformed as much by the boom in new techniques, at the forefront of which are Internet and the mobile phone, as by the tendency towards concentration within the hands of increasingly powerful international groups that format information and create a powerful filter in the understanding of the world and as by the increase in vehicles of information. In China and in Europe, how do journalists perceive their role, their future and their responsibilities? Faced with the contradictory movement of nationalist withdrawal and the spread of commercial cosmopolitanism cut off from its roots, what path must they take? Can they trace the future together?