Uninvited Dinner Guests: A Theoretical Perspective on the Antagonists of Journalism Based on Serres’ Parasite

In the digital age, the crisis of journalism has been exacerbated by antagonistic actors infiltrating the journalistic system without adhering to its norms or logic. Journalism itself has been ill-prepared to respond to this challenge, but journalism theory and research have also had trouble in grasping these phenomena. It is thus the aim of this article to propose a theoretical perspective on a specific set of antagonists characterized by its paradoxical nature. It is ‘the excluded third, included’ as described by Serres, the parasite that is both part of the system and its antagonist. From the perspective of systems theory, the parasite is a subsystem that threatens the integrity of the primary system. Thus, the parasite is defined by the relations that describe its position, its behaviour towards the host system. Due to these peculiarities—this contradiction, this vagueness—it evades a classical bivalent logic. This may be one reason why the paradoxical nature of the antagonist from within, the ‘uninvited dinner guest,’ has not been described as such until now. The parasitic practices follow the logic of the hacker: He is the digital manifestation of Serres’ parasite. Accordingly, parasitic strategies can be described as news hacks whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies. In doing so, they not only change the system output but also compromise its values and exploit its resources.

A Functional Public Sphere? A Systems Theoretical Look at the Professionalization of Political Communication

The basic proposition of this article is that the democratic potential of professionalization clearly outweighs the problems, at least in the Danish case, but probably also more generally. Thus, my claim is that the professionalization of political communication contributes positively to the development of the public sphere and more democratic communication in the political system as well as the journalistic system. This claim is, however, not based on critical public sphere theory, but rather sociological systems theory headed first and foremost by Niklas Luhmann. Thus, the article introduces the functionalistic strategy of analysis of systems theory as an alternative to what could be called the utopian method of critical public sphere theory. In the final instance, the choice between these two traditions is simply a matter of analytical approach.