Novinarstvo u funkciji društvenog progresa
Journalism in the Function of Social Progress

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyzes the limits and possibilities of journalism in the context of social development. The author starts from the modem definition of journalism as mass public communication of citizens — everybody, with everybody, about everything, with arguments, fully, and personally responsibly — and not as a one-way presentation of information to citizens by journalists. Reviewing the potential of such new journalism, transformed from a closed to an open and mass communicative activity, the author stresses the importance of public communication for the sustaining and acceleration of social development and progress in all spheres of human life and work. The old model of journalism, however, with its closed dissemination in the function of maintaining the control of the ruling oligarchies, has a retarding and detrimental effect on social development. Thus, the question of the role of journalism in social progress cannot be viewed one-sidedly; rather, it must be viewed dialectically, as an interaction of all the factors — social, communicative, educational, philosophical. Since the transformation of journalism from a closed into an open, mass communicative activity depends in the first place on the education of new profiles of professional people (communicators, presenters, editors, and regulators of public dialogue), the author concludes that the proposed changes should be accompanied by a new code of conduct for all participants in public communication (and not just journalists as is the case at present with the existing information codes).

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