Bleak prospects - press freedom between Facebook and Wikileaks

A video from Time, which is currently circulating on the internet and - not least - being passed on in the form of Facebook entries, illustrates just how big a power Facebook has become: Minute by minute, 510,000 comments, 232,000 messages and 136,000 photos are uploaded to the world's most successful and largest social network, the "like" button is clicked around 383,000 times and 99,000 friend requests and 74,000 event invitations are sent - and with each of these mouse clicks, the network operator collects valuable data that enables advertisers to reach their target groups increasingly without wastage. In the USA, Facebook has now overtaken Google.

What is "sin Uhl" to one person is "sin Nachtigall" to another. For the old media, not only for the "wooden medium" of print, the outlook at the start of the year is rather gloomy: advertising continues to migrate to the internet, but hardly to the websites that offer high-quality journalism. This continues to be cross-subsidized primarily by subscribers to traditional print media - or, in the case of public service offerings, forcibly financed by taxpayers, although the lion's share of the concession money is spent on expensive soaps, shows and sports rights, but not on foreign correspondents and journalistic excellence.

As expected, Murdoch's attempts to date in the UK and several media companies in France to introduce payment systems are proving laborious. The work of convincing people that independent journalism (and press freedom!) are worth something and must therefore cost something has probably only just begun. The willingness to pay that has been destroyed over the past twenty years by free gifts cannot be "sustainably" reversed in just a few months. Especially as those publishers who are determined to do so find themselves in a prisoner's dilemma. Their competitors hope to be able to keep their - then mostly mediocre - journalistic offerings on the market solely financed by advertising, at least as long as the competitors' payment barriers drive more users into their arms.

Anyone who shows signs of weakness in predatory capitalist societies must expect the powerful to follow suit. In view of the many economically weakening press and TV empires, it is hardly surprising that freedom of the press is increasingly being trampled underfoot: Not only in China and Russia, where we would expect this to be the case anyway, but also closer to home - in EU countries such as Hungary, where a pretentious head of government is abusing his two-thirds majority in order to curb the media, and in Italy, where an age-stubborn, autocratic and overpowering media mogul is probably reluctant to resign from his post as prime minister primarily because, without the protection of his high office, he will be targeted by law enforcement authorities from the day he steps down until the end of his life. However, it is certainly not helpful when respected representatives of the "fourth estate" such as the Guardian, Spiegel, Le Monde and El País cooperate with Wikileaks to show the diplomatic routine of a world power from the inside and, above all, to circulate gossip instead of ultimately disclosing illegal information. The Reuters Institute in Oxford has reminded us of the small difference that matters: What is "in the public interest", i.e. really in the public interest, belongs in the public domain. This includes not only the classic Pentagon Papers, whose publication by the New York Times and Washington Post marked the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War, but also the video of a US Army attack on civilians in Iraq, which Wikileaks published some time ago.

In the case of the last Wikileaks series, however, the media could at best claim "the public's interest" as a motive for publishing the secret documents. They acted in the interests of an ever-curious public - and in doing so may have done more harm than good to the public interest of democracies and perhaps even the global community. The acclaimed "Pro Am" cooperation, the collaboration between media professionals and amateurs, in which many internet gurus see the future of journalism, turned into "Pro Crime", a cooperation between self-important journalists and criminals who both claim to be above the law. In other words, a collaboration between data thieves and data stealers.

The media themselves are also contributing more than a mite to the dismantling of press freedom: Anyone who does not handle such a precious commodity responsibly need not be surprised when it disappears.