The Communication Contract Between the Public and the Press

Claims and Limits in the New Media Era

Abstract

In a “liquid society”– as Umberto Eco characterised postmodernity as it is “crossed” by the crisis of the state, of ideologies and of the community ‒, an era of “unsettled individualism” and consumerism in the form of “bulimia without purpose” (Eco 2016, 7-8), responsible journalism is necessary, one that is interested in practices with cultural value and heralds the beginning of a new role for the media. It's about the daily inclusion of at least two pages of Internet site analysis, showing which ones are valuable and which ones spread “hoaxes or inaccuracies” (Ibidem, 363). On the one hand, this would represent an incentive to the public to read the press, and, on the other hand, the confirmation that not all users can distinguish “rambling ideas from well-articulated ones” (Ibidem, 362).

In the spirit of the uses and gratifications theory, the public's expectations of the mass media to satisfy needs such as “...to learn things about myself [...], to feel emotional, to feel less lonely [...], to get someone to do something for me” (Severin & Tankard Jr. 2004, 311) are to be rewarded and generate credibility and loyalty, regardless of whether one analyses the individual choices and uses or the common effects of media contents on the public (Drăgan 2007, 54-55). With all the limits and criticisms of this model: it is only the reaffirmation of the theories of selective influence (DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach 1999, 190), it exaggerates the power of the individual and the freedom of the consumer, it leads to the cancellation of the content of the message in favour of interpretation, etc., it proves viable in the public space dominated by New Media and in the context of the sources-press-public communication contract