The Free Press: Necessary Illusions

I. The Critique of the Political Economy of the Press

Since the beginning of the twentieth century the CPEP has built into capitalist societies a consistent critique of the media in general and of the press in particular. One of its fundamental assertions is that there is an unbridgeable gap between the free press as an ideal and the actual functioning of the press in capitalist systems. ⁶ They have argued that under capitalism, the idea that the press is free and independent, committed to the discovery and reporting of truth, to the advancement of knowledge and the strengthening of democracy is just an illusion. ⁷ The urgent task is, accordingly, to show this illusion in order to “debunk some of the mythology that impedes scholars from undertaking clear analysis, and prevents citizens from being effective participants in media and communication policymaking.” ⁸

The press, that is, the system of mass communication that continually produces and delivers regional, local and global news, has suffered enormous transformations since the CPEP began to expose its problems in capitalist systems. The emergence of the Internet, blogging and social media has radically transformed not only the platforms of communication but also – and perhaps more importantly – the way in which news are mediated and the participation of the public in the process of mediation. ⁹ Despite all these changes, the central critique of the CPEP – as it will be seen – has remained basically unchanged. The CPEP is mainly a critique of ideology. For Chomsky and Herman, for example, mass media are “effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship.” ¹⁰ This propaganda model “suggests that the ‘societal purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state.” ¹¹ For Bagdikian, the institutional bias of the media “does more than merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world.” ¹² More recently Nick Davies stated “we are deep into a third age of falsehood and distortion, in which the primary obstacles to truth-telling lie inside the newsrooms, with the internal mechanics of an industry which has been deeply damaged.” ¹³ The list can go on and on with similar descriptions of the media and their effects on audiences. All of them, however, share a common element, especially when it comes to the press. This is its ability to select, produce, censor and spread information that contributes to reproducing existing social practices and aligning public opinion with the tenets of prevailing ideologies.

The type of critique favoured by the CPEP assumes that the illusion of the free press is a problem of false consciousness: the illusion consists in the belief that the press is free and independent, when in fact it is subject to a series of economic, political and financial constraints that severely limit its freedom and hence its capacity to provide adequate depictions of reality. Chomsky and Herman originally developed this influential critique back in the 1980s in their Manufacturing Consent. There they identified a propaganda model which “describes the forces that cause the mass media to play a propaganda role, the process whereby they mobilize bias, and the patterns of news choices that ensue.” ¹⁴ One of the central problems they identified of media markets in general and of the press in particular has been that of their tendency towards concentration of ownership. This tendency, it has been argued, affects the ability of the press to develop its functions freely and independently. ¹⁵ Concentration affects “the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across the public.” ¹⁶ Concentration has also been generally associated with the reduction of diversity, not only of media contents, but also of viewpoints. In general, concentration has been identified as a serious threat to democracy and a serious impediment to the communicative functions of the press. ¹⁷

Another focus of this critique has been the strongly profit-oriented character of media markets, manifested in their heavy reliance on advertising as the main source of revenue. Adorno and Horkheimer claim that advertising is the cause of media production of sameness. ¹⁸ This is so because, as contents need to appeal to the tastes of mass audiences in order to attract advertisement financing, the media in general and the press in particular need to lower their standards so as to find a common denominator, something which might be shared by largely heterogeneous groups of people with different interests. Moreover, as media providers are competing to attract the same mass audiences, not only do they lower their standards, but each also tends to replicate the contents offered by the others. Media contents thus tend to look very similar irrespective of the existence of a multiplicity of media providers. Economists have referred to this phenomenon as “competitive duplication.” ¹⁹ They have argued that minority tastes will only be served if media companies in a specific market are able to exhaust the profits generated by majority programming and pursuing minority audiences becomes more profitable than making marginal gains with the majority. ²⁰ Although this effect applies to the media in general, the press is particularly affected because advertisers usually prefer to show their products on platforms that are able to reach massive audiences. In these circumstances, not only do news contents tend to be relatively homogeneous across the spectrum, but serious journalism is also usually eclipsed by programmes and contents designed to amuse and entertain rather than to inform the public.

Further problems have been identified in the strong dependence that the media has on advertisement. According to Chomsky and Herman, advertisers have become the patrons of the media. Accordingly, they do not simply stimulate the production and diffusion of contents that appeal to massive audiences, they are also “normative reference organizations, whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they are to succeed.” ²¹ This is how advertisers, for example, tend to control dissident views. Indeed, as it is unusual for them to subsidize those who tend to prejudice their interests, they would naturally not tend to advertise their products in unfriendly business media. The radical press, which canalizes dissidence and is generally antagonistic to the interests of big corporations, is one of the victims of a media system heavily reliant on advertisement. Similarly, advertisement can also work as immunity from bad publicity as the press will usually have second thoughts before denouncing any scandal that might be linked to its advertisers.

The media environment has radically changed since Chomsky and Herman first articulated the propaganda model. With the emergence and spread of digital technologies, platforms of communication have multiplied; the amount and access to information has exploded; participation in the public sphere has increased in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago, and so on. Sources of information have also varied. Much breaking news, like Ferguson for example, appear now on Twitter before newspapers pick them up. Although these changes have affected the financial viability of the press and its relevance in the formation of public opinion vis-à-vis other news providers, the CPEP has remained as vital as ever. This is because despite radical transformations of the public sphere, “the tremendous promise of the digital revolution has been compromised by capitalist appropriation and development of the Internet.” ²² While the production and distribution of news remains under the logics of capitalism the central assumptions of the CPEP will remain unaltered and the critique relevant.

There are different manifestations of capitalist appropriation of the digital sphere. Analyzing them in detail would deviate us from the central aim of this article. However, a simple sketch of this issue might better illustrate this point. First of all, the Internet has consistently increased as a source of news consumption. In the UK, at least, the Internet was the second platform for news consumption (41%) after television (67%) and before newspapers (31%) and radio (32%) in 2015. ²³ However, the most consumed news on the Internet are those coming from traditional news media (64%). Among them the most popular (apart from the BBC) are the Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent and The Mirror, all newspapers that existed before the emergence of the Internet, and most of them, even before television. ²⁴ It is true that their business models have been radically affected in the last years. However, most of the problems originally detected by the CPEP have remained unaltered – some of them have even gotten worst. ²⁵ The press has become more dependent on advertisement as they have seen their revenues substantially affected by free access to online contents. Moreover, online take of classified advertisement (Craiglist and Gumtree) – one of their most important sources of revenue – has also radically affected their income – making them even more dependent on (less) advertisers. ²⁶ The financial pressure of newspapers has affected one of its most celebrated products: investigative journalism. Therefore, while the old problems of the political economy of the press have sharpened, their offer has weakened.

Although the CPEP has accommodated its critique to the current conditions of the press, their central line of argument has remained unchanged. The basic idea is that the press in capitalist systems is subject to a series of constraints that substantially define the type of news distributed in the marketplace. Thus, news tend to reproduce prevalent ideologies and hence provide a misleading picture of social reality. The solution given by the CPEP to this problem is to expose the actual conditions of the press in capitalist systems. The purpose is to show that under capitalist conditions of production the idea that truth will find its way through a free market of ideas is a myth; it is an illusion that needs to be unveiled.

II. Technological Progress and the Construction of Social Reality

A completely different way of thinking about the relationship between the free press and truth has been elaborated by the cultural critique of the press. Although the cultural critique shares with the CPEP skepticism about the capacity of the press to provide adequate depictions of social reality, their reasons to be skeptical are entirely different. As we have seen, the CPEP’s skepticism is based on the conditions of production of the press in capitalist systems. They believe that the press can be an instrument for the advancement of truth and knowledge. It certainly requires radical transformations, but if they are correctly implemented, truth might be achieved. The cultural critique, instead, is skeptical about the very possibility of a truth-seeking press. This critique has taken several forms. Here I want to explore in some detail the one that claims that reality is a social construct fundamentally shaped by media technologies.

According to Marshall McLuhan media technologies have not only altered the way in which communications are processed, much more important, they have changed the very world we live in. ³⁸ Media technologies offer different forms of communication, forms that diverge in the way in which they approach their objects, in their point of views and in the aspects they tend to emphasize or ignore about them. It is indeed very different to watch a football game on television than to listen to it on the radio. Both, in turn, are completely different from reading a report of the game online. But technologies not only affect the way audiences perceive the game, they have changed the game itself. Football would be played differently if there were only radio. Media technologies have epistemological implications because they affect our perception and understanding of the world. But the way we perceive the world also changes the way in which we relate to it in and the way in which we relate to each other. This is why it is argued that media technologies not only have altered our perception and understanding of the world, they have changed the world itself.

Since the media – from this point of view – plays a central role in the construction of social reality any serious understanding of the latter requires a serious examination of the former. Accordingly, the cultural critique has divided modern history in a series of periods or epochs, all of which are shaped by the prevalent media of their time. Neil Postman, for example, compares the Age of Exposition, dominated by typography and controlled by the written press, with the Age of Show Business, dominated by the image and controlled by television. ³⁹ According to Postman, the written media forces a particular construction of public discourses – of truth telling – which respond to the requirements of its form. On the one hand it forces writers, politicians, journalists and anyone who is involved in the production and communication of news to provide a coherent and structured exposition of ideas which need to be presented systematically to the public. Moreover, it requires its readers to develop certain basic skills in order to understand and engage with the complexity of the written form. When public discourse is dominated by the written word, there is no escape from meaning. Indeed, words devoid of meaning are nonsense, at least for the requirements of the print. Hence, if written ideas are to be understood, they need to be coherently organized, properly arranged and adequately structured. These were central requirements of public expression in the typographic age, and this form, according to Postman, defined the epistemological conditions of societies in which the prevalent medium was the written language.

Television broke the rationality, uniformity, linearity and the sense of meaning that characterized communications in the Age of Exposition. The world of television, according to Bourdieu, is afraid of boring and anxious of amusing audiences. ⁴⁰ News are particularly affected by this trend. In fact, serious information, detailed argumentation and investigative journalism are all shadowed by the prominence television gives to scandal, violence and crime. The world shown by television is a world full of ethnic struggles, religious wars and racist hatred, “a world full of incomprehensible dangers from which we must withdraw for our own protection.” ⁴¹ Moreover, it is a world that we cannot even begin to understand because it is shown in fragments, as parcels of information where there is no connection between one event and another, except for the fact that they all occurred on a similar period of time. Reality thus becomes a “series of unrelated photos” or, according to Postman: “a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events, [a world in which] all assumptions of coherence have vanished.” ⁴² Television thus promotes political disengagement and favors the status quo by forming audiences alienated from their political and social reality.

The dystopian Age of Show Business gave way to the “Network Society,” a term coined by sociologist, M. Castells to refer to a “social structure that characterizes society in the early twenty-first century, a social structure constructed around (but not determined by) digital networks of communication.” ⁴³ Two central aspects of this technology need to be emphasized for the purposes of this article. The first one is media convergence. From a technological point of view, “telecommunication networks, computer networks, and broadcasting networks converged on the basis of digital networking and new data transmission and storage technologies, particularly optic fiber, satellite communication, and advanced software.” ⁴⁴ By reducing information to binary codes, digital technology dismantled the old lines that used to separate mass media. Now, a single physical technology is able to carry multiple services that in the past were provided separately. On the other hand, a service that was provided through a single medium is now provided in a multiplicity of physical forms. ⁴⁵ The cell phone is the paradigmatic form of media convergence. Through a single device we can watch television, read the press, pay our bills and listen to our favorite songs, among many other things – including using the phone for what it was originally conceived.

Media convergence is not simply integration of different forms of communication into one single technology. It is integration into an interactive network. ⁴⁶ This second aspect of digital networks of communication is crucial. Indeed, those who used to be passive recipients of information flowing vertically from press agencies, newsrooms and broadcasting studios can now actively participate in the construction and circulation of news. Interaction has allowed people to communicate with one another and to express themselves in the public sphere in ways that were unthinkable only a few years ago. It has strengthened political activism, participation, and control over the acts of government and power, just to mention some of its consequences. Not everyone thinks, however, that the changes brought by digitization are necessarily for good. What Nicholas Negroponte prophesized under the name of the “Daily Me” back in the 1990s ⁴⁷ and Castells explored more recently under the term “mass self-communication” supposes that digitization is seriously eroding the public sphere. ⁴⁸ The explosion of virtual communities and social media in which its members share common interests or desires; the emergence of a blogsphere which is essentially a personal form of communication (to which some authors have referred to as electronic autism); or collaborative filtering, which is used by a number of sites such as Amazon, Spotify and Netflix to suggest its customers contents according to their own tastes are all forms of mass self-communication that are affecting the vitality of the public sphere. In fact, they have fragmented audiences in such a way that the public sphere is rapidly being replaced by the subjective experience that each singular individual gets through media consumption. If television was once the cause of the loss of meaning, the transit to digital technologies is producing the loss of a shared world. And as we lose the space we have in common the bonds that hold together a political community also get weaker.

The cultural critique does not merely analyze the effects that media has in culture. It contains an underlying assumption about the ontological character of reality itself. If the rational order of modernity (its linearity and sense of meaning) and the fragmentation of postmodernity are the consequence of the prevalent media technologies of their times, then these are not simply instruments that help us to get hold of reality. On the contrary, they configure the very reality they are supposed to communicate. This assumption is relevant to understand how the cultural critique understands the relationship between truth and the free press. In fact, if reality is not independent of mediation but is precisely the product of mediation, then the press ceases to be an instrument of knowledge to become the fabric of knowledge itself. This assumption, in its most radical version, made Baudrillard describe Watergate and the Gulf War as products of the media. But there are subtler manifestations of this idea. When reality loses its objective and independent character so as to become a social construct, it also disappears as a referent by which media communications can be assessed as true or false or as expressing an underlying meaning beyond the realm of appearances. From this point of view, knowledge of social reality can only be reduced to the interests and forces militating in its formation. Thus, the press – at its best – would only be able to “deconstruct” this reality by unveiling the different interests participating in its formation and thus privileging (as long as it is possible) the plurality of contingency over the singularity or identity of the “meaning” assigned to this contingency. Although this strategy is designed to avoid ideological mystification, it can be as ideological as those that are supposedly committed to the discovery of an objective truth. The comparison between western media depictions of the 1991 Gulf War and the Bosnian war might be useful to exemplify this. According to Renata Salecl:

Instead of providing information on social, political or religious trends and antagonisms in Iraq, the media ultimately reduced the conflict to a quarrel with Saddam Hussein, Evil Personified, the outlaw who excluded himself from the civilized international community. Even more than the destruction of Iraq’s military forces, the true aim was presented as psychological, as the humiliation of Saddam who was to “lose face”. In the case of the Bosnian war, however, notwithstanding isolated cases of the demonization of Serbian president Milosevic, the predominant attitude reflects that of a quasi-anthropological observer. The media outdo one another in giving us lessons on the ethnical and religious background of the conflict; traumas hundreds of years old are being replayed and acted out, so that, in order to understand the roots of the conflict, one not only has to know the history of Yugoslavia, but the entire history of the Balkans from medieval times … In the Bosnian conflict, it is therefore not possible simply to take sides, one can only patiently try to grasp the background of this savage spectacle, alien to our civilized system of values … Yet this opposite procedure involves an ideological mystification even more cunning than the demonization of Saddam Hussein. ⁴⁹

The predominant form of communication involved in the Bosnian war follows, according to Žižek, the strategy of the “externalization of causes.” ⁵⁰ It is the radical opposite of the “internalization of the external contingency” identifiable in the Gulf War where the context and real causes of the conflict are ignored and everything is condensed in the figure of the evil man, Saddam Hussein. In the former case, on the other hand, it is the ethnic cleansing which is neglected in favor of the over analysis of contingency and the particularities that serve to explain the Bosnian war. There are at least two major problems associated with this strategy. The first is that the more the emphasis is placed on the context, the more the major ethical issues involved in the conflict are relativized. Indeed, what should be the primary focus of attention, genocide, takes a secondary position in a debate that concentrates on the historical, ethnical and religious struggles in the Balkans. The more these conflicts are dug into, the more space is given to understanding, explaining and even justifying crimes which should be totally and absolutely condemned once and for all. Accordingly, a debate that at first sight appears to take distance from particular positions turns out to be extremely ideological because in the best case it provides a context for horrible crimes and in the worst scenario it gives grounds to justify them.

The second problem is that when the analysis of the circumstances of a conflict is taken to such radical extremes so as to relativize, for example, the gravity of crimes against humanity, subjects are relieved from the responsibility of acting. According to Žižek, the theoretical expression of this problem finds a homologous reversal in the notion of personal responsibility. Indeed, one way of concealing the web of social, economical, cultural and political circumstances involved in criminality is the idea of a fully responsible individual: “the system can function only if the cause of its malfunction can be located in the responsible subject’s guilt.” ⁵¹ When responsibility is fully condensed in the individual, the figure of the criminal tends to be demonized and the social context of criminality tends to be ignored. However, when the opposite is true, that is, when the externalization of causes are radicalized and every action is seen as the product of those circumstances, it implies a notion of the subject which is completely detached from itself, completely determined by its environment and whose ability to act is thus radically stifled. ⁵²

III. Re-thinking the Illusion of the Free Press

Regardless of the problems of the CPEP and the cultural theories identified in this article, they both challenged a fundamental social expectation with respect to the idea of a free press. This is the possibility of the press achieving a correspondence between its depictions of reality and that same reality, as it is in itself, independent of those depictions. We can no longer naively assume such correspondence. For the CPEP, this is the consequence of the actual conditions of the press in capitalist systems; for cultural theorists, it responds to an ontological misunderstanding of social reality: reality is the product and not the object of mediation. The illusion of the free press consists, from these perspectives, in the possibility of securing a continuity between both fields.

But although these critiques have exposed the illusion, although they have demonstrated that there is a gap between reality qua reality and that same reality as represented by the press, they have insisted on the possibility of bridging this gap (in the best case) or on the futility of such an enterprise (on the worst). While for the CPEP this illusion could be overcome by understanding the conditions under which the press functions, for the cultural critique the illusion is redundant because there is no underlying truth to be discovered beyond the sphere of appearances. Consequently, both critiques assume that the illusion is disposable.

The CPEP’s strategy of exposing the actual conditions of the press in capitalist societies in order to trigger transformations has proven to be ineffectual. Not even a growing awareness of these problems, an increasing public distrust of the press and the massive scandals affecting it, has changed its privileged role. On the other hand, the cultural critique seems to have dropped the illusion altogether. In fact, if according to them there is no reality to be mediated, there can neither be an illusion masking it. They have replaced the illusion with a thick blanket of skepticism leaving a series of unanswered questions, such as, what would be the role of the press if it has nothing more to offer than mere constructs detached from the reality it is supposed to mediate?

Although it is undeniable that the press, to a certain extent, constructs social reality rather than mediating it and that many of the problems exposed by the CPEP affect the ability of the press to adequately depict social reality, if we do not cling to the illusion of a correspondence between both fields, an important part of our own sense of reality becomes a mess. This is why the truth-seeking justification of the press cannot be simply disposed of just by proving it wrong. In this final section I will argue that the illusion of the free press is not a false idea of what the press really is, nor an ontological misunderstanding of social reality. The illusion is, in contrast, a cognitive necessity. We need the illusion that a free press is able to mediate a world that exists in itself because otherwise the reality principle itself is under threat.

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud refers to the word illusion when discussing about religion. In this context the illusion is not merely a deceptive appearance or a false idea or belief about someone or something. In contrast, “We refer to a belief as an illusion when wish-fulfilment plays a prominent part in its motivation.” ⁵³ Religions are illusions, according to Freud, in the sense that they provide us with comforting explanations of the most difficult cosmic questions. We might even renounce to our critical judgement if we can get, in return, the comforting feeling that religion provides. ⁵⁴

In a similar vein, Kant talks about the “transcendental idea.” Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism is based on the fundamental distinction between things as they appear to us (appearances or phenomena) and those same things as they are in themselves (noumena). Human beings can only know things in the former sense. There is no cognitive access to the thing in itself. ⁵⁵ Whenever we use the transcendental categories to cognize things in themselves, rather than things as objects of sensible intuition, antinomies emerge and with them the sphere of illusions, which Kant calls transcendental illusions. ⁵⁶ Hence, according to Kantian philosophy, we can never imagine in a consistent way the world as a whole, “as soon as we do it, we obtain two antinomical, mutually exclusive versions.” ⁵⁷ There is always a fissure, a break between things as they appear to us and those same things as they are in themselves.

The problem is that if experience is to retain its consistency we cannot realistically renounce what lies beyond the sensuous realm of appearances. We need to believe that outer reality count as a thing in itself, independent of us. According to Žižek, “if I do not assume that the house I see now has its back side which correspond to its front – then my perceptual field disintegrates into an inconsistent, meaningless mess.” ⁵⁸ In other words, we need illusions in order for experience to make sense; we need them to understand our world as a consistent whole, that is, as a world which is not just limited to our perception of objects of experience. Otherwise, if we renounce illusions, reality becomes inconsistent, fragmented and partial; reality becomes an artefact, it becomes virtual reality. ⁵⁹ In other words, although Kant exposes a necessary fissure between things in themselves and appearances and denies cognitive access to the former, he recognizes that we cannot avoid the illusion of thinking of those things as things in themselves even if we are perfectly aware that the product of this thought is an illusion. This illusion is as unavoidable as it is for the astronomer to prevent the rising moon from appearing larger to him, even when he is not deceived by this illusion. ⁶⁰ The illusion will “not cease even though it is uncovered and its nullity is clearly seen.” ⁶¹

Transcendental idealism’s distinction between things in themselves and those same things as they appear to us is productive when used, as an analogy, to understand the notion of the illusion of the free press developed in this article. In fact, the press is, so to speak, a space of appearances, one that by breaking the barriers of time and space opened up a new sphere of the sensible to human beings. ⁶² In this sphere the old Kantian distinction between appearances and things in themselves and all the problems this distinction brought about reemerge in a different dimension. This time the press is a third actor in the epistemological table and the main problem consists in identifying the relationship between the space of appearances or mediated reality and that same reality as it is in itself, independent of those mediations. In this context, the following questions arise: what is the nature of the world that appears through the press? Are these appearances constitutive of reality or are they just mere representations of some reality that exists in itself, independent of the media and independent from us?

These questions have, in some way, already been answered in this article, at least from the point of view of the CPEP and the cultural critique. For the former tradition there is a reality that exists in itself, there is a true version of the world which the press aims at representing. The distortions between these two realms are, according to this critique, the consequence of the material conditions of the press in capitalist systems. This is a press whose ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few powerful media moguls, a press that does not represent the diversity of opinions and interests militating in contemporary societies, a press which, moreover, depends for its survival on the interests of advertisers, and so on. Under these circumstances, the idea that the free press is a transparent mediator of social reality is just an illusion.

What characterizes cultural critiques, on the other hand, is their epistemological skepticism. The space of appearances cannot possibly reflect a reality that exists in itself because there is no such thing. Instead of representing an independent reality, the press constructs the very reality it is supposed to represent. This is thus a world of appearances, of the image or the spectacle where connections to a deeper realm of meaning or truth have forever been lost.

The CPEP and cultural critiques have re-enacted the Kantian dilemma of the relationship between appearances and things in themselves. Just as Kant definitely separated the thing as it is in itself from that same thing as it appears to us, the theories examined in this article radically separated the realm of appearances or mediated reality from that same reality as it is in itself. As a consequence, the narratives used by the press to describe and communicate a particular event seem to be forever displaced from the events they attempt to describe. But if our knowledge is limited to the sensuous products delivered by the media and there is nothing beyond those images, words or sounds that our cognition can apprehend, then our knowledge of “social reality” becomes impossible. Although we know, to some extent, that the press cannot provide access to the events it describes as they are in themselves, we need to stick to the illusion, we need, at the very least to think that those events exist in themselves, independently of how the press describes them. Otherwise one of our fundamental connections to social reality would be lost forever.

In the Kantian system the transcendental idea maintains alive the illusion of thinking of things as things in themselves in order to retain the sense of reality; in the context of the press, the illusion of the free press is what keeps alive the connection between an independent reality and that same reality as it is described by the press. If the illusion of the free press is thought of in these terms we can understand why, regardless of its obstacles and limitations, the truth argument in free speech doctrine and critique remain strong. Through this analogy we can also answer the questions that have been left unanswered by the CPEP and by the cultural critique. As a matter of fact, if the critique of the strategy of exposure of the conditions of the press favored by the CPEP is not effective, this is not because, as Sloterdijk would claim, we live in a post-ideological world whose subjects are cynical and their knowledge of the conditions of the world they live in does not affect their practices. On the contrary, if we keep on granting such importance to the press it is because we need the illusion just as we need the transcendental idea in order to think of the world as a consistent whole. We need the illusion of the free press in order to preserve the idea that there is an independent world beyond the space of appearances and that a correspondence between reality as reality and mediated reality is achievable. Similarly, the idea of the free press has escaped the postmodern skepticism because it is not possible to effectively renounce to the illusion. Otherwise, “as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself.” ⁶³ As soon as we renounce the illusion of the free press, we immediately lose connection to a fundamental aspect of our social reality that is mainly sourced by the press. This explains the unavoidability of the illusion of the free press and defines its ideological character.