Journalism and Democratic Backsliding: Critical Realism as a Diagnostic and Prescription for Reform

Renewed scrutiny of how U.S. journalism functions as a political institution is warranted in an era of democratic backsliding. While news media cannot deliver policy on their own, they are fully equipped to represent, interpret, and amplify grievance. If disaffection is directed at retribution rather than policy, journalism contributes to backsliding in the further pathologizing of (non)-responsive government. This essay proposes critical realism (CR) as a heuristic for conceptualizing unique contributions of news media to backsliding. Reality consists of layered strata in CR. This approach accepts the premise of news as a social construction but maintains that a domain of reality exists independent of discursive representation, and that this realm can be actualized in ways that are damaging to democracy. Applied to political communication, the domain of the real includes democratic deficits that may or may not become actualized depending on how journalism operates at the empirical level. Critical realism also generates insights applicable to reform. CR insists that journalists avoid reifying sentiment in ways that comfort authoritarians. The diagnostic acknowledges the journalistic conviction that an external reality is knowable, positing nevertheless that the news interacts with underlying social forces. The profession must forge a healthier relationship with the public to avoid reifying audience support for anti-democratic norms. Reflexivity could be directed beyond the recognition of complicity to two productive rationales for safeguarding democracy: liberal multiculturalism and journalistic paternalism. A final section offers a framework for future research in tracing linkages between journalistic practice and backsliding.