Media Freedom. Damian Tambini
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Название: Media Freedom
Автор: Damian Tambini
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Кинематограф, театр
isbn: 9781509544707
isbn:
The work of rebuilding media institutions is under way, but it is stalled, blocked by a predictable compound of interests: the new tech giants locked in a lobbying battle against a new regulatory settlement, and the old media, clinging on to their status as the watchdogs of democracy, but denuded of the resources to meet the obligations this entails. Each protagonist claims the mantle of liberty to defend their interests, and democratic politicians seek their own advantages, without a long-term plan for how to fashion a more adequate deliberative apparatus for the post-broadcast era.
This book offers a theory of how a new approach to media freedom can guide reform of media governance and legal judgements on freedom of expression. Popular consent, civil society and genuine public deliberation are evasive phantoms: as recent elections have shown, trust and the minimal consensus over facts can fracture if citizens perceive that the information they receive is controlled, or ‘fake’. Provision of ‘authoritative’ facts and opinions usually backfires if publics doubt the motives or interests behind them. Only an autonomous, decentralized media system can provide democracy with an information quality filter that is rightly trusted. Because that media system cannot be entirely free, but is threatened at every turn by constraint, its regulation must be based on an explicit and agreed set of principles.
The first stage in a mature theory of media freedom is to reject the ideology that free and effective democratic communication can be served by unconstrained liberty to publish. Communication depends on rules and institutions and resources, whether these are provided by languages, grammars, codes, principles, laws, subsidies or management of the airwaves. Once it is accepted that the libertarian ideal of no rules, or the rule of the market, is an illusion, the debate can start about whose rules, which rules, and whether liberal democracy requires a specific regime of rights and privileges for mediating institutions of communication. This book argues that it does, and that we need to learn from the history of broadcasting and the press in order to ascertain what the key values and principles should be, as well as what they should not be. Without such a theory, which draws on the past of press and broadcasting liberty, and also looks to the future of internet governance, constitutional principles of communication in the democratic state will lack coherence, continuity and legitimacy.
This book argues that we need to revisit the legal doctrines and philosophical principles of press, broadcasting and media freedom in order to build a new approach to democratic communication that runs with the grain of the history of press and speech freedom. In order to understand and resolve the conflicts and fissures in contemporary approaches to media freedom, we need to understand more about their origins. It is necessary to excavate the reasoning that lies beneath the principles that have been sedimented in law and policy over centuries.
This book shows that the law and philosophy of media freedom are in danger of becoming further polarized, between a global human rights system in which media enjoy conditional freedoms as institutions, and are able to claim special privileges in return for the ethical function they fulfil, and the exceptionalism of a United States rightly proud of its unparalleled global leadership of media freedom, and wedded to a ‘marketplace of ideas’ ideal of stateless communication. The time has come for an accommodation between the US and the global human rights system. Liberal democracy can no longer afford the luxury of disunity.
Media systems are in turmoil. They will be reconstructed through a wide range of interrelated policy debates which can be made coherent through a common set of normative principles based on existing rights. The system of international human rights has already developed a template for media freedom as a fundamental right, but more needs to be done to align democracies with these core principles. Liberal democracies must agree a core theory of media freedom in order to proceed with institutional renewal. This book outlines this theory.
1 Media Freedom: Unresolved Tensions
Introduction: Media Freedom and Global Governance
Media freedom is an integral element of global security and prosperity. People need free media to provide them with accurate information and informed analysis . . . Where journalists and media organisations are free to do their work safely, societies are more prosperous and more resilient. The free exchange of views and information that results allows communities to identify and pursue emerging opportunities and to recognise problems that must be addressed. Attacks on media freedom are attacks on human rights.1
This declaration, from the Canadian and UK governments in 2019, expresses the consensus among the governments of advanced democracies that media should be free. Spurred on by US leadership in the early post-war years, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have sought to limit the ability of governments to interfere with newspapers and broadcasters. In doing so, they have developed an international structure of law that creates a protected space for a network of media institutions. When the European Union (EU) adopted a new Charter on Fundamental Rights in 2011 it demanded that ‘the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected’.2 EU governments made an agreement in 2014 that they would protect and promote media freedom and the EU funds a project to monitor and map threats to media freedom.3 Since 2012, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has reported annually on trends in media freedom.4 The Council of Europe operates a platform for real-time reporting of threats to media freedom,5 the United Nations (UN) now employs a Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, and another international organization, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), appointed its Fifth Representative on Freedom of the Media, a post established in 1997, in 2020. In its report of November 2019, the Representative called for all countries to include a commitment to media freedom in their constitutions.6 The world now has a highly developed legal and institutional structure devoted to protecting media organizations.
Intensive, global, governmental and inter-governmental activity is matched in the world of NGOs. ARTICLE 19, with an annual budget of more than £7m, ‘works for a world where all people everywhere can freely express themselves and actively engage in public life without fear of discrimination’.7 Index on Censorship, with an annual spend of around £1m, ‘documents threats to media freedom through a monitoring project and campaigns against laws that stifle journalists’ work’.8 The International Press Institute, with an annual budget of over £1m, described its ‘mission to defend media freedom and the free flow of news wherever they are threatened’.9 Reporters Without Borders, publisher of the annual Press Freedom Index (annual budget around €6m), claimed to be ‘the world’s biggest NGO specializing in the defense of media freedom, which we regard as the basic human right to be informed and to inform others’.10 Another, US-based, international research and advocacy organization, Freedom on the Net, extends to the new medium of the internet: by 2020, its annual budget was $30m.11
Democratic countries attempted to export what was seen as a model framework for the operation of media systems in a democracy to other countries and regions within their spheres of influence: because media organizations have the ability to shape public opinion, they should be separate from the state. Their freedom is not absolute but subject to checks and balances to ensure they meet their ‘social responsibilities’.12 Those checks and balances, because of the potential for collusion and capture between states and media, must be transparent, rooted in civil society and professional ethics.
This liberal democratic framework was constructed in response to an awareness of the potential authoritarian consequences of media freedom, at key historical junctures, such as the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the institutionalization of the post-war international human rights institutions. The post-war movement to shield media organizations from control by the state has been institutionalized in laws to protect journalists and the media through СКАЧАТЬ