ONLY ONE billion of the world’s six billion people, on this World Press Freedom Day, live in a country where the press can truly be described as free. It is a harsh reality that, according to the Freedom House NGO, reflects an eight-year ebbing tide of press rights that has eroded some of the advances achieved in the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and democratisation in Africa and South America.
Forty per cent live in states without a free press, the group says, 44 per cent with only a “partly free press”. And for many the price of upholding press freedom is high. In 2011 so far, 16 journalists have paid with their lives for practising their profession. The EU again tops a Reporters Without Borders press freedom league with 13 member states in the world top 20. Ireland is at No 10 but the performance of others remains poor: Italy is at 49th and Greece and Bulgaria are tied on 70th.
Yet although there is an increasing recognition in international human rights law of press freedom as an essential pillar of democracy, providing a crucial check on the powerful, there remains an uneasy tension over its limits even in the most open societies. Just as freedom of speech is ultimately the freedom to be obnoxious, so freedom of the press can become in practice the not so worthy freedom to intrude, to pry, to profit from misery, to sate salacious appetites and to subvert.
Strident advocacy of such rights can be caricatured as little more than the defence of press barons’ profits. Juries and the public have taken a dim view of special pleading by newspapers over the burden of excessive defamation costs. And recent complaints by British papers about the iniquity of gagging super-injunctions for the super-rich have hardly aroused the public. In Ireland recognition of that real gulf between the press and public led to an acceptance by the press of the need for independent regulation in the form of the Press Council.
But, as former New York Timespublisher Arthur Sulzburger put it: "Freedom of the press, or, to be more precise, the benefit of freedom of the press, belongs to everyone – to the citizen as well as the publisher. . . The crux is not the publisher's 'freedom to print'; it is, rather, the citizen's 'right to know' ". That this fragile right is also under threat, not just from dictatorship but the economic pressures that have closed hundreds of newspaper titles in Europe and North America, is important to acknowledge on this day. A free press has a price. But are we willing to pay it?