PRESS FREEDOM IN DEVELOPING AND DEVELOPED COUNTRIES

Press Freedom in Developing and Developed Countries

Press Freedom in Developing and Developed Countries

Introduction

In a growing and inventive society the uses of liberty constantly develop new problems. Self-interest is explorative; its ingenuities more than keep pace with the enlargements of general welfare through the progress of science and the arts. To meet such abuses, the ever present instinct of repression offers first aid; liberty is abused, reef it in by law! If there is a minimum sphere of personal freedom, if there is an incompressible area, which neither corrective measures nor the demands of community welfare ought to invade, there is new need to chart it. If, on the other hand, our Bill of Rights has been too free with personal freedom, (Brown 2004 25) if by distributing unqualified liberties with too lavish a hand we have squandered some of our moral resources as we have our forests and oils, it is time that this also be recognized.

At this moment of history all the freedoms that make up a free society are under scrutiny. To the liberal mind, liberty has often seemed not only "the first of all political goods" but almost the whole of social wisdom. This, as we commonly understand liberty, can hardly be the case; as the building of states must precede the call for liberty within states, so, continually, the forces that maintain states must hold their own with the forces, which liberalize them--the two, should agree, but they are seldom identical (American Voices, 1987).

Historically, “press freedom” is known as such because it was printers and newspapers that fought for this right which nowadays refers to media in general. It is a right that goes beyond an individual's freedom of expression, much as it is also built upon that right.

Discussion

To deal with this factor requires that we interrogate the definition of new media. Not everything printed on paper is “the press”; and not all in the press is journalism in the power-sense defined earlier. Instead, around the world, much is propaganda - commercial advertising and/or state messaging. Similarly, despite the ubiquity of cell phones, not all cellular use is relevant to public life, just as not all Internet use touches on freedom of expression issues, let alone press freedom. As with cell phones, much Internet use (everywhere) is primarily for personal use (rather than issues that test rights, freedoms and state authority) Eveslage 2000 147).

Yet, the point is that both the Internet and cell phones are far wider creatures than just media ones. Their significance for democracy is also wider than the role of journalism within such media. Thus, in a nutshell, not all cell phone or Internet use counts as new media in a mass-communicational and public sense; and further not all new media amounts to journalism as such. Yet, the focus for this paper is upon press freedom as it pertains particularly to journalism as critical one-to-many (i.e. public) communication about public power (Brown & Yule 2003 648). Other Internet or cell phone functionalities may be highly relevant to democracy, but they ...