Book Review: The Illusion of the Free Press
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919884180 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Author | Pablo Marshall |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
JOHN CHARNEY, The Illusion of the Free Press. London: Hart Publishing, 2018, pp. 216.
ISBN 9781509908875, £55.00 (hbk).
John Charney’s The Illusion of the Free Press, like all good academic books, intends to
rationally reconstruct a discussion and generate, from such reconstruction, the basis for a
novel proposal for the understanding of a problem. In other words, this book fulfills the
two most important academic purposes. First, it gives an account of a long tradition
about free press theories. Charney pronounces the words that the tradition has used,
reviews the problems that the tradition has faced, and accepts the triumphs and failures of
the tradition. Second, Charney accounts for the tradition with a critical view, identifying
a new perspective from which the literature on free speech, free press, and political
freedom in general could be read, enunciated, contextualized, criticized, and possibly
superseded. The spirit of this book is, therefore, one that should inspire all constitutional
theory when it is easy to forget important ideas of the past and it is also difficult to
imagine creative proposals that help us in the intellectual enterprise of understanding
contemporary society from an emancipator viewpoint.
It should be noted that the book engages with different traditions of thought. Although
the tools of critical theory are used to identify the fundamental problem that the book
addresses and due deference is shown to the various liberal and democratic theories
about free press, the normative commitment of the author is ultimately with a republican
theory of law and politics.
Henceforth I would like to portray the main ideas of The Illusion of the Free Press.
The book is divided clearly into three parts and consists of five chapters. Chapter 1
formulates the main argument of the book: ‘the idea that the free press is a transparent
mediator of social reality is just an illusion’ (p. 22). Reviewing the literature on the
critique of the political economy of the press (CPEP), which identifies the economic
organization of the media in a capitalist society as the cause of the depiction of reality in
a way that serves the interests of capital, Charney argues that the relationship between
free press and the audience’s access to truth can be generative of a false consciousness.
The chapter also introduces the problem associated with the postmodern idea formulated
by the cultural critique of the press, according to which our access to the social world is
dependent on the technological means we use and, ultimately, constitutive of what we
call reality. Therefore, the very idea that freedom of expression allows us to portray the
world as it really is cannot be possible. Faced with these two devastating criticisms to
the correspondence between truth in the world and the truth portrayed or represented in
Social & Legal Studies
2020, Vol. 29(1) 146–157
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663919884180
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