What the public demands is professional integrity, and that is the least a journalist can and should offer them.
14ymedio, Federico Hernández Aguilar, San Salvador, 28 July 2025 — Referring to his fellow countryman, the priest and writer Benito Feijóo, Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, the most influential Spanish academic of his time, wrote with irony that he did not want “to do him the affront of calling him a journalist, although he has something of that in his worst moments.”
This fact is curious for two reasons: first, because it illustrates how much animosity the journalistic profession caused among Iberian intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century—considered by many of them to be the devaluation of literature—and second, because Menéndez y Pelayo always enjoyed, while he was alive, what today we would call a “good press.”
Don Marcelino was far from imagining that journalism would become, by dint of demonstrating it, not only an unavoidable social power, capable of shaping culture, but also a primordial space for deciding the strengthening and even the permanence of democracies in the modern world.
The value of opinion, as well as the vehicles that transmit it, is unquestionable. In his immortal 1859 work, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill provides the classic liberal argument on the subject: “If an opinion were silenced, that opinion, so far as we know, might contain the truth. To deny it is to assume our own infallibility. In the second place, even if the silenced opinion were erroneous, it may well contain—and indeed frequently does contain—part of the truth; and as the general or dominant opinion on any subject is seldom the whole truth, it is only in the free clash of opposing ideas that the opportunity arises of attaining the rest of the truth.”
Journalism in this era continues to face powerful enemies, from those who fill prisons with critical informants to those who silence opinions with more sophisticated methods.
Hence the importance of freedom of expression and its guarantees, as well as the struggle that people must wage to preserve it. Journalism in this era continues to face powerful enemies, from those who fill prisons with critical informants to those who silence opinions with more sophisticated methods, such as resorting to digital intimidation or paying for the disseminators of fake news.
The 1989 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Camilo José Cela, without any gratuitous concessions, directed his wit toward a greater understanding of the journalistic profession, predicting success for communicators who aspired to “intellectual understanding and not a visceral feeling of events and situations,” in a constant (and healthy) review of their personal attitude toward reality. Considering the variety of circumstances that complicate the relationship between the news professional and the shifting terrain of facts, this reflection is timely.
Of course, the ways in which a media outlet, exercising its freedom, responds to the obligation to report truthfully differ. What should be uniform is the effort—not only constant, but growing—to achieve that minimum level of awareness and responsibility that should ideally underlie any honest search for the truth. It is there, in that small gap, where credibility is gained or lost.
Quoting Cela’s Dodecalogue again, it states: “Respect for the truth, the simple and immediate homage that must be paid to the truth day after day, must guide the steps of the journalist who aspires to play his role with dignity, grandeur, and effectiveness…” And indeed, the duty of editorial conscience to ask, amid the daily hustle and bustle, what criteria define what is considered to be in the public interest and how these criteria will be applied in the articulation of the news belongs to the realm of editorial conscience. And there, as in almost everything, the proposals are as diverse as the thoughts, experiences, and even prejudices.
The problem, many times, lies not in defining what truth is being told, but in how much truth is being ignored. What provokes distrust, for example, is the attitude of what I call the “journalist fly,” that type of news prowler who goes to the truth with the same avidity as flies in gardens: seeking only and exclusively the garbage. This coprophagous instinct doesn’t limit itself to “feeding” on rot; it presents it as the most emblematic thing in the surroundings. What’s questionable here isn’t the desire to talk about the filth that may be in a garden, but the attempt to turn that filth into the entire garden!
In highly controversial cases, partially exposing the truth can be as unethical as not exposing it at all. Depending on the scope of their story, a professional journalist knows that context is an inescapable duty.
In highly controversial cases, partially exposing the truth can be as unethical as not exposing it at all. Depending on the scope of their story, a professional journalist knows that context is an inescapable duty. And contextualizing means offering the public a true perspective of the garden before their eyes, presenting without exaggeration the distance between fragrant roses and excrement.
Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of the newspaper Le Monde, once said: “In journalism, objectivity doesn’t exist; honesty does.” Unfortunately, rather than uncovering and exposing the truth, some people do their work to justify their own theories. In exchange for their attention or preference, however, what the public demands is professional integrity, and that is the least a journalist can and should offer.
If we delve into the complexities of human nature, it should come as no surprise that freedom of expression is one of the most vulnerable achievements of modern civilization. Despite this fragility, however, it must be emphasized that honest journalism, practiced courageously, may well be the last bastion of dying democracies.
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