You probably thought it was the other way around, right? But former New York Times bureau chief Bill Kovach illustrated this point for visiting journalists at the State Department’s Foreign Press Center by looking back before the 17th century’s Age of Enlightenment transformed European society.
Back then most, as impoverished commoners, “had no place in the community except to keep their mouth shut and do their work,” Kovach said. “They had no information about how the community was run and how the people and institutions of power did their business because no one told them.”
Occasionally, word would trickle down of the monarch’s latest proclamation, a local religious leader would relay a few pieces of news, or a traveling troubadour would pass through singing about the happenings in a village hundreds of miles away.
But public opinion “is what democracy is based on,” Kovach says. And there was so little information back then that it was basically impossible to have a real opinion on your leaders or how you were being governed.
When people began compiling newsletters of information for their communities, they not only invented journalism, but for the first time they enabled others to have an opinion about anything, which increased the pressure to allow more to have a say in government.
For more on Kovach’s views on the media, see the article “Media Analyst Urges Revival of ‘Independent’ Journalism.”