# "Only 1% of the global population can freely access information" – Thibaut Bruttin's Inaugural Lecture **Date de l'événement :** 13/10/2026 * Publié le 13/10/2026 ### Date 13/10/2026 ## Chapô _**"The news has a value and we need to value that. We need to fight for that. \[...\] Journalism is an important part of democracy, and it's quickly, quickly, quickly eroding."**_ **Sciences Po's undergraduate campus in Le Havre hosted alumnus Thibaut Bruttin, Director General of Reporters Without Borders, for its inaugural lecture on 2 September on the topic of “information and disinformation”. He outlined for Sciences Po students the state of press freedom, its current threats, and future solutions.** ## Corps du texte As a 2010 graduate, it's very interesting for me to be back to my alma mater today. I'm not going to be speaking about just any type of content, but about information, understood as the news. It's not content, it's not comment. It's not entertainment. It's not commercials. It's not propaganda. It's not hate speech. The news has a value and we need to value that. We need to fight for that. The organisation I am running, Reporters Without Borders, was built 40 years ago with the idea that journalists need to get some solidarity internationally, that when you are in your home country, you are trying to report the facts. You can be jailed, but if other people come to your rescue, your situation can end better. You can get freed, you can get international support in order to continue and maintain your operations. Back in 1985, Reporters Without Borders was a very tiny organisation. Now it's 15 locations around the world. Most of the staff is not in Paris. We have a huge operation in Asia, based in Taipei. We really are able to monitor every press freedom violation that happens around the world. Plus, we advocate for journalists in every country we work in. We're trying to get better laws. We're trying to get to talk to people to make the situation healthier for journalists, even by talking to repressive regimes. We are sometimes, in fact, doing some sort of parallel advocacy and parallel diplomacy. And we also support, concretely, information to make it accessible to the public and help journalists flee their country when there are at risk. So all of that is Reporters Without Borders, whose most famous publication is probably the World Press Freedom Index. This map tracks the level of press freedom in about 180 countries. Today, I would like to address three matters. First of all, the state of information and how it is today globally, how do we assess it? Second is what are the threats that are most worrisome? What are the threats that might kill journalism and the news? And third, because I want you guys to live with some hope, I'll try to outline some of the solutions for the future. The state of press freedom -------------------------- About the state of press freedom today, we have to be honest, only 1% of the global population can freely access information. Back in 1985, it was more around a third of the global population. It means that large countries, large populations are only accessing information under control, with journalists that might be impoverished. We are concerned by this global trend because we're seeing an all-time low. When the Word Press Freedom Index was initiated at the beginning of the 21st century, the average score was 72 out of 100 for a country. The average score is now 54. So we've seen a sharp decline, which is a kind of contradiction to the spirit of this index**.** At the beginning of the 21st century, lots of international institutions, and even NGOs, were hopeful about the future of democracy. Let us not be mistaken, journalism is very much tied to the promise of a large-scale democracy. In order to form an opinion, to get people to be aware of what's going on and be able to vote, you need to have a free press. Too often, in the public debate, I feel that journalism is kind of avoided or forgotten, that democracy is reduced to the election. In fact, if you look into political science, you have reasons to believe that to have a democracy, you need to have a healthy public debate up stream, then you need to have an election and finally also a rule of law down the stream. So all of that is very much tied to democracy. I am worried today because I am seeing the return of violence against journalists, even in countries which are allegedly countries at peace. This week, we've seen the eighth journalist killed in Mexico. We've seen more than 200 journalists being killed in Gaza. We've seen dozens of journalists being killed by the Federation of Russia in Ukraine. The killing zone in Ukraine for journalists, and civilians that are afraid of drones, is expanding now. Drones strike very much behind the front lines now. This return of violence is a big concern, but we also need to see the reality. There is a political model that is attractive. We are living through a Machiavellian moment. Like Machiavelli theorised it, if you win, you are right. With the election of Donald Trump in the United States of America, we've seen the behaviour of a large democratic state which is now mimicking some of the most despotic regimes that Reporters Without Borders is fighting against around the world. Donald Trump has not been elected despite the media, he has been elected because he repeatedly assaulted the media. He undermines the trust in media in order to continue performing whatever he wants to perform, to get richer or more aggressive towards political enemies. So this is a difficult political moment for a free press. We also have a tech disorder. You might have noticed social media, news aggregators, content aggregators, and all sorts of tech tools that are not necessarily favouring the news. They're even, for the Meta products, favouring family and friends. Yes, we need to be accessing the content from our family and friends, but we also need to have access to information, to reliable information, to journalistic content, which is, little by little, being dissolved into the web. We have an economic crisis, which is obvious in some countries. A quarter-century ago, you had about 60,000 journalists in the United States. Now you only have 45,000. About fourth of the population of journalists in the US have found a new job. This is facing Europe now: we're seeing massive handovers of journalists which are being kicked out of the newsroom. We should be very aware of that. And last but not least, we see a decline of trust in media. Media, in all the polls, are perceived as among the least trustable institutions in society. We need to question ourselves, why is that so? Are the media able to represent the realities and the political complexities and the social complexities of societies? Are they failing to do their mission? It is true that we have to restore the link, the bound between society and the media. At the end of this first segment, I'd like to put the emphasis on the fact that we might be seeing the beginning of an extinction even for the press as we knew it. I'm not saying that the press is going to disappear. For those of you who know music, for example, jazz was important music back in the 1950s. It still exists. You still have jazz clubs, jazz bands. You still have jazz magazines, jazz labels. But it's for a very tiny elite. What I'm concerned with is the fact that journalism, as a driving force into the public conversation might disappear. Trust me, wealthy people, people which are executives of big companies or policymakers, know the value of information, they're subscribers of many media. But the vast majority of the population is facing the possibility of not accessing information anymore. Journalism is an important part of democracy, and it's quickly, quickly, quickly eroding. So that is why we have to also look at the world ahead. Rising threats to the media --------------------------- Journalism has been defined too often as immediate history, a way to write history as it happens now. But it has to look back, and it also has to look ahead. If we look back, there have been major change in the way we access content. One of the most underestimated one has been autoplay. The fact that when you look at content on Instagram, it automatically starts. You are getting into a stream that never ends. You are no longer choosing whatever you access because it's been chosen for you based on preference criteria. The value of the press, as something that opened up a window that can let you understand complexities and diversities that you had no idea of, is being disrupted. Another question, which is really major for me, is the fact that we use the tech tools more and more as a way to answer questions. That is in itself interesting, but also dangerous: how can we ask ourselves questions that we have no idea of? The press was this ability to go and see at the other side of the street, on the other side of the world, what is happening. It cannot be transformed into a question. Yes, the press can fact-check things. It can tell you what is true, what is not, but it's not its main function. Its main function is the emancipation of the human being by giving access to information. I'm going to tell you a story. Once I was in Hong Kong and I met a North Korean citizen. It's very rare to meet the North Korean citizens because they're barely allowed to exit their country. And I knew more about North Korea than this North Korean citizen, and it made her cry. She was ashamed of not knowing. So let us value the importance of the news, and let us value the fact that we need to use it as a way to empower ourselves. That being said, there are two upcoming trends. When I say upcoming, we are facing them now. One is a backlash against the universality of a free press, the idea that journalism would be something for "people like me". A white dude from Europe, fairly wealthy, fairly bourgeois, that might be enjoying the press. But the idea that it would not be culturally or economically relevant for many people is expanding. For example, if you look at the way the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to extend its rule over the information, it has used international fora to try and say that a free press is a Western thing. We also have a kind of momentum that is difficult to live through. We know at Reporters Without Borders that around the world, whichever country I go to, and I've travelled to 40 countries last year, we have journalists that are not paid by George Soros, that are not totally aligned with "Westernised news". But they totally trust their mission into a free press, regardless of their culture, regardless of their political views. I mean, in India, Reporters Without Borders has been standing with, you know, an old style Marxist, Prabir Purkayastha, who's been researching social movements in his newspaper in India, and also with Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong media owner that is currently jailed and might die in prison in Hong Kong. All these people, believe me, trust Reporters Without Borders to help them, but are also convinced that a free press is something that matters for the future of their societies. And also, we have to look at the way we can cross various indicators. The fight against corruption can be indeed performed by district attorneys and lawmakers, but one of the best ways to hold power accountable is journalism at its best. Individual choices are determined by our ability to access journalism as well. In most of the public events I do, people talk about journalism and politics. Yes, it is very much intertwined. But political choices are not the only ones that matter. Education choices, health choices, safety choices, economic choices: all of that requires as much information as possible. The development of societies is very much tied to the ability to access information. So I would like to once again highlight the fact that what matter is the equal access, universal access to a free press. A second trend that is worrying me equally is the confusion between what freedom of the press can bring and what freedom of expression can bring. It's a debate we're having currently, for example, in France. Is it the mission of journalists to speak their mind or do they have to bring facts? Is it possible to draw a distinction between opinion and facts? Reporters Without Borders' answer to that is very clear and is very much in the initial spirit of the First Amendment of the American Constitution, which makes a difference between freedom of speech and freedom of the press. If the founding fathers of the American Republic decided to separate freedom of speech and freedom of the press, it's because they knew precisely that they were two different things. And freedom of speech is not hate speech. It's not the ability to say any speech. It's an ability to take part in the public conversation. Equally, we have to look into what freedom of the press means. It doesn't mean the ability for journalists to say what they believe, what their owners believe. It's, in fact, a responsibility as well to collect and disseminate the facts to the public. By clarifying all of that, we're able to face the geopolitical backlash of the expanding free speech movement. You might have seen that the United States of America are using free speech as a geopolitical tool, as a diplomatic tool. Brazil got huge tariffs based on alleged infringements of freedom of speech. In fact, Brazil is now trying to get a healthier ecosystem digitally. It is trying to pass legislation that regulates social media in order to continue maintaining the media lifeline online. This global offensive of free speech should not be seen as anything else than a decoy**.** We need to be careful when talking too much about free speech, even if we can never speak too much per se about free speech. By putting all the weight of a large diplomacy on free speech, you forget the journalists in jail and the need for societies to access information. Highlighting a few solutions ---------------------------- In order to conclude, I'd like to highlight a few solutions because the picture I just drove was fairly bleak, if I'm honest. First of all, we need to distinguish between media and journalism. Even as a citizen, sometimes I'm really pissed off by what I read or what I watch on TV. I'm just like, wow, that's just so far away from what I expect from the media. In fact, a lot of the media now are actually performing some sort of infotainment. The segments dedicated to actual news are diminishing, and we should spend more time consuming them and encouraging journalists to do their job, which has the highest value in the public debate. Second, we need to avoid the trap of defending enemies of journalism. A lot of the propaganda outlets globally, whichever country they're from, whichever interests they serve, are trying to portray themselves as part of the free press. I had the very unfortunate history of opening up a letter from _Russia Today,_ about five years ago, asking me to defend them, on behalf of Reporters Without Borders, as they were facing legal persecution in Latvia. Well, freedom of the press was not invented for foreign powers to intervene in national political debates. Freedom of the press is a protection that should be granted to people that actually do perform freely that task, and not to people that are doing exactly the opposite. Just as Reporters Without Borders was very clear on the fact that, no, the Hamas people that were portraying themselves as journalists would not be defended because they were not independent of political powers and terrorist groups. Believe me, there are hundreds of journalists doing their job in Gaza that we support and that we need to support. By distinguishing them from people that have political and terrorist eyes, we're able to get them evacuated, for instance. We need to define clearly what is propaganda and to be careful about the fact that a lot of media now are playing a dangerous role. A lot of media are now doing anti-media media work. They are undermining, as weird as it seems, the trust in media. If you look at what's going on in the United Kingdom with _GB News_ or in France with _CNews_, or in the United States with _Fox News_, you see a lot of channels which portray themselves, posture themselves as being anti-establishment. They might be anti-establishment to some extent, but they are also mostly not independent and undermining trust in the actual news media. We need to build an accountability system for tech companies because a lot of the amplification of propaganda, disinformation, anti-media content is made through TikTok, through X, through Meta products, and there is no integrity factors in social media or search engines. To access _Google News_, you can be any type of media, there is no threshold. We are convinced that going forward, democracies should really have what we call a "due prominence" for news media, that we should collectively, democratically build rules to avoid journalism disappearing from the tech tools.  We should not be satisfied with the fact that there is a global legal irresponsibility of the tech companies. We should avoid that Mark Zuckerberg becomes the editor-in-chief of the world, and he's not doing journalism in any way, so he has no editorial responsibility. He can't be unresponsible at all. One of the most striking examples in my life was when Russia started circulating fake videos of me on X. I went to X and asked them to suppress the content and they refused because they said the guy looked like me. It looked like me because it was an impersonation! So how can X be so irresponsible and unaccountable? That is one of the main issues that democracy will have to answer in the near future because one of the cost of the public debate is being based on rules. Appropriate, transparent rules that everybody should abide by. We need to implement a new deal for the press to continue having newspapers and to pass the fantasy that anybody can be a journalist. That is false. You need to have means, financial means, to report from the other side of the world, to publish and access the technical tools that enable you to broadcast or air your shows. The last point I would like to put emphasise is that we should all claim our right to reliable information. Freedom of the press is probably a civil liberty. We can put it in that category among the freedom of religion, the freedom to assembly, the freedom to unionise, and many other rights. But freedom of the press is too often perceived as a privilege for journalists, when in fact, it's about us. It's not about the journalist. It's about any of us accessing information. Every one of us need information. Making that right something that we all claim is very important to build a coalition that will enable us to continue accessing information, but also to show solidarity to journalists worldwide and restore some advantage to journalism, which is now facing unfair competition in the digital world. Let us be careful. There is no such thing as a given democracy in which there is freedom of the press. You need to have in mind the fact that many people today are suffering because they believe in a free press. In democracies, it is clear that freedom of the press is the result of campaigns, of a conquest that has been won and hard won. So we should not be the spoiled children of democracies and value information. We often take it as a given. I was one of you, about 20 years ago, and I can say that I was not aware of the need to access information on a daily basis. Sometimes, we have subscriptions to TV platforms, to Netflix, and even if we don't access them, we just pay for it. Let's do that with media, it is totally okay. Believe me: subscribe to as many media as you want. It's really important to support it and also to access it as much as you can. As citizens, you need this access to information to do your democratic work. As students, you also need to cherish information, valuable information, reliable information, journalistic information. Don't fall for media criticisms. Yes, there are reasons to criticise the media, but also to value journalism for what it is, which is a great benefit to democracies and to yourselves in your studies. **Licence :** `#CC-BY-NC-ND (Attribution, Pas d'utilisation commerciale, Pas de modification)` ### Thématique `#Démocratie` `#Géopolitique` **Langue :** `#Anglais` --- ### Navigation pour IA - [Index de tous les contenus](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/llms.txt) - [Plan du site (Sitemap)](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/sitemap.xml) - [Retour à l'accueil](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/)