Le journalisme en péril: les leçons de 1864 (The Atlantic)

Bel article du magazine The Atlantic qui s'inspire du récit des négociations entre Abraham Lincoln et Jefferson Davis en 1864 pour bien montrer l'importance d'une presse indépendante. The Atlantic est une publication qui célèbre son 160e anniversaire et cette histoire a été puisée dans ses archives.

 "We who are lucky enough to work at The Atlantic, and to celebrate, this month, its 160th birthday, are naturally captivated by the magazine’s history. The Jefferson Davis episode is one of the more fascinating stories from our past, for at least three reasons. Not least of them is the evident esteem in which America’s greatest president held this magazine. Presidents have written for The Atlantic with regularity. And we have tried, since the time Nathaniel Hawthorne served as our Civil War correspondent, to cover the presidency carefully, deeply, and critically.

The Davis episode also interests me because the wily Lincoln sought to exploit The Atlantic’s reputation for fairness and detachment—our founding manifesto promised readers that the magazine would be “of no party or clique”—for political advantage. And he succeeded. The lesson here is obvious: We must always—but particularly in moments of high political passion—guard our independence. Today, at a notably fractious and polarized moment in American history, one in which the notion of empirical truth itself is under assault, we have a special obligation to let the facts, and analytic rigor, be our only guides. Do we sometimes fail? Yes. Do we defend against the exploitation of The Atlantic’s reputation by the many parties and cliques of today? Also yes."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/a-half-a-dozen-battles/540672/