Press Freedom

FEATURES OF PRESS FREEDOM

Although many scholars consider limitations as part of Press Freedom, the basic reality remains that the main feature of Press freedom is the absence of Limitations. Milingo (2002) would argue, “Freedom can never have attachments…it is freedom as it is. To be free simply means to live and behave as you are created to be. For instance, as a human being, I am not meant to fly, and if I flew, then I have challenged my freedom”. By this, Milingo meant that to be free means to live as you are supposed to; living a good and moral life. This was backed up by the former Editorial Board Chairperson Sakina Dattoo when she explicitly said that freedom cannot be defined with limitations. Press freedom is a positive word and cannot go with limitations which are a negative. Similarly, press freedom would imply being able to live in demand of the codes of journalistic ethics.

Masanja Thomas (2009) also brings out another feature of press freedom as, where people have all the powers to question the government action. This implies that every member of the society has the right to censure and criticise the government’s activities.

The third feature could be what George Orwell in his preface of the famous animal farm considers as implying to the absence of interference from an overreaching state. On the other hand, the world-renowned professor of economics and Nobel Prize winner laureate Amartya Sen argues that the independent media also provide a voice to the neglected and disadvantaged while simultaneously preventing governments from insulating themselves from public criticism. He clarifies this when he says, “No substantial famine has ever occurred in any country with a relatively free press. This thus brings us to the fourth feature of press freedom.

It is little wonder that Sen says:

It is, thus, not at all astonishing that no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press. Large famines have occurred in authoritarian colonial regimes (as in British India), in repressive military regimes (as in Ethiopia or Sudan in recent decades), and in one-party states (as in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, in China during 1958-61, in Cambodia in the 1970s, or in North Korea in very recent years). Even though the proportion of the national population that is affected by a famine rarely exceeds 10 per cent, which may be electorally unimportant, yet public discussion of the nature of the calamity can make it a powerful political issue.

In a nutshell, there are many features of Press freedom that many scholars would argue about. However, informed and unregimented formation of values requires openness of communication and argument. The freedom of the press is crucial to this process. Indeed, value formation is an interactive process, and the press has a major role in making these interactions possible. New standards and priorities (such as the norm of smaller families with less frequent child bearing, or greater recognition of the need for gender equity) emerge through public discourse, and it is public discussion, again, that spreads the new norms across different regions.

"No man is an Island, entire of it self," John Donne has told us. And yet the politics of censorship attempts to isolate us from each other. That suppression diminishes our lives, reduces our knowledge, stifles our humanity, and maims our ability to learn from each other. To overcome these handicaps, we need freedom of communication, including press freedom. What can be more important than that?