Journalism is not Communication, it is much less: why Communication is a virtue and builds democracies

Abstract

This article offers a critical response to Carlos Elías’s argument, which opposes Journalism and Communication by attributing epistemological and democratic superiority to the former over the latter. It argues that this dichotomy rests on an idealized, selective, and moralizing conception of journalism that overlooks its practical heterogeneity and its structural links with other forms of symbolic mediation. Against this view, the text contends that journalism is not a sovereign domain but a subfield integrated within the broader field of Communication, from which it inherits resources, limits, and conditions of possibility. It further maintains that narration, fiction, and rhetoric are not external or corrupting elements, but inherent components of journalistic production. From this perspective, the contemporary crisis of journalism should not be understood as the result of a supposed communicative perversion, but rather as a consequence of the loss of its historical monopoly over public mediation. The article concludes that the pluralization of actors, narratives, and technologies does not erode democracy, but instead broadens its deliberative possibilities and strengthens the public contestation of meaning.