The Press and Democratic Publics Beyond Habermas Freije, Vanessa. Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 304 pages Samet, Robert. Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2019, 232 pages

As online platforms have all but monopolized the sites and forms of public life, from electoral campaigning to shopping and from entertainment to news, Deadline and Citizens of Scandal find in the moral and political economy of the information that good old printed newspapers produce some crucial insights into the logics of mediated democratic publics—online or offline. Canonically speaking, printed media was a means to a Habermasian public sphere of reasoned, “rational” debate; examining how news production organizes claims and political demands and differentially (dis)connects publics from each other and from certain stakes, Samet and Freije show how printed media interpellates its publics by conjuring up the immanent truths of popular sovereignty, stratifying the voices that count as popular or sovereign. Both books focus on Latin America, where journalistic denunciation and testimonials’ long history as artefacts of truth-telling and political action have traditionally had a more complex relationship with the makeup of the public sphere. This is a bold, original theoretical claim, developed expertly and convincingly. Following reporters’ work around individual crime scenes, morgues, police stations and ministerial declarations, Samet shows how they, their witnesses and their readers, deploy socioeconomic, historical, and political associations (63–69) to link murders, dispossession, partisan allegiances, and policing practices into a chain of demands for justice, infrastructure, jobs, safety whose organising rationale is victimhood (101, 160–166). “Denuncias,” broadly speaking, news-cum-journalistic-exposés in the spirit of Zola’s J’accuse, integrate these demands presented before the tribunal of the people and on behalf of the people. The public sphere emerges as victimhood becomes a politically productive claim. Editors, readers, and relatives of the deceased contribute to determining which victims entered this public sphere and how (71). This works not through “objective” debate and the circulation of narrowly understood “facts,” but through the sorting of bodies by the affective and symbolic truths of popular sovereignty which demands redress—Venezuelans, as a people, are all potential victims (118). Samet’s success stems in part from an intelligent and generous reading of Laclau and structuralist classics. In an exceptionally refined analysis of the murder of a photographer during anti-Chávez protests (89–110), Samet shows how the immanent, eternal “people” and the organic, mortal residents converge through the identification of a common enemy. This process is contingent, even contradictory—indeed, both Chavistas and their opponents claimed the photographer as their own victim at the hands of the other side. In fact, time and again Deadline shows how journalists from ideologically opposed media collaborate, how partisan tactics reallocate funds and allegiances from one “side” to the other, and how similar in style and content both Chavismo and its opposition often were. Samet’s originality is to resist the interpretive tendency to inventory contradictions to “show” how fluid and flexible experience is, showing instead through these tensions that the politics of antagonism have nothing to do with ideological consistency. This is not because populism is “irrational,” but because the structuration of oppositions was never about a mechanistic or deterministic sorting of sameness and difference to begin with. The entire point of this political ontology was always that things—bodies, funds, ideas—come to stand for other things they may well have no organic or consistent relation to, like crime victims turned into the charismatic vessel for a people that has been wronged. Rendered in beautiful, sharp and immensely accessible prose, this outstanding ethnography is anthropological theorizing done in a way that once seemed long gone. It is probably one of the most insightful studies of populism across social sciences in recent times. It will interest readers in political and economic anthropology broadly defined and would be a perfect addition to course …