Press Freedom and Pluralism in Europe

Concepts and Conditions

Andrea Czepek, Melanie Hellwig

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781841502434
• eBook ISBN: 9781841502977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

We assume that freedom of the press is guaranteed in a democratic society. But, in Press Freedom and Pluralism in Europe, researchers from twelve countries reveal that it is all too frequently a freedom that is taken for granted. In turn, they examine media systems throughout Europe and report on their conditions for independence and pluralism. Contributors to this volume discuss press freedom and diversity through several case studies involving such countries as the Baltics, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Finland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. This volume provides a critical basis from which to evaluate media freedom in the United States, and will consequently be of interest to scholars of media and communication studies.

PART ONE: CONCEPTS

MEASURING MEDIA FREEDOM: APPROACHES OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON

Markus Behmer

Introduction

Every year on 3 May the ‘World Press Freedom Day’ is celebrated. It was proclaimed by the UNESCO in 1992, to mark the ratification of the ‘Windhoek Declaration’. It was adopted one year later, during a regional UNESCO conference, when media representatives and experts had demanded independence, freedom and pluralism of the press.

Even sixteen years after Windhoek, 3 May is not a red-letter day, a day for joyful statements – rather, it offers the opportunity for critical appraisal. Freedom of the press is an ideal, yet oppression of that freedom is still reality in many places. Furthermore, since September 11 2001, freedom of communication and media has even suffered setbacks, worldwide. The fight against terrorism has often been a plea for constraints of media freedom all over the world. In Russia, the media are controlled and exploited by the president and powerful economic groups; the lives of journalists who gave critical reports from Chechnya were threatened. In China – and not only there – access to the Internet is strictly controlled; critical net activists are arrested. In Iraq the media are still in a sorry state. In Columbia journalists are kidnapped or murdered; in Cuba they are imprisoned on a massive scale.

This list could be continued for some time. In western democracies as well, even in Western Europe and in Germany, there is, here and there, cause for concern, for instance, when editorial offices are searched on suspicion of betrayal of state secrets, or telephones of journalists are wiretapped, or critical coverage of firms is omitted on account of pressure by advertisers. Of course, one has to think in relative terms here: phone bugging operations are alarming, but may not be equated with the arresting of critical journalists; the closing of websites due to pornographic or racist contents does not equate with acts of official pre-censorship in the run-up to elections.

To begin with, it should only be noted that the elementary human rights to gain information from a multitude of various sources and to communicate freely are under threat in many places, in different ways and to different extents. The most massive breaches of these (as of other) basic rights are to be found in those regions which are commonly (albeit in an unduly trivializing or at least strongly abbreviated manner) referred to as the ‘Third World’ – and particularly in con ict areas.

The International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) features the most comprehensive collection of breaches to the basic rights concerning communication around the globe on the World Wide Web. It gives numerous current alerts almost daily. That the cases shown on the pages of IFEX usually deal with injustice is not only self-evident but also clear under international law.

Media freedom and international law

Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; the right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.’

These words are worth being remembered again and again. However, Article 19 is only a general manifesto which needs to be substantiated in two ways: first, its content is rendered more precisely by further inter- and transnational conventions, such as Article 10 of the ‘European Human Rights Convention’ of the European Council (1950), the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (now OSCE) from 1975, the UN Millenium Development Goals, the Conventions of the World Trade Organisation WTO, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and other UN sub-organizations, particularly in the various media declarations of the UNESCO. The later ones show how difficult it is to reach a worldwide consensus, even regarding the basic implications of Article 19. The work of the UNESCO communications department was paralysed or overshadowed by disputes over the unconditional ‘free ow of information’ versus a better-balanced worldwide ow of information aided by a ‘New World Information and Communication Order’ for at least two decades in the seventies and eighties (see for example Rohn 2002; Breunig 2000).

The second area of implementation or realization of Article 19 concerns national law. Christian Tietje clarifies this in the International Media Handbook of the Hans Bredow Institute: ‘Just as in the jurisdiction of the international system in general, so it is in the areas of communication law, the states still being the protagonists as to jurisdiction and its enforcement’ (Tietje 2002: 17). Here it can be observed that freedom of communication is part of the basic rights catalogue in almost all constitutions on earth.

A detailed survey was carried out by Christian Breunig in 1994 in which he analysed, amongst other things, the contents of the constitutions of 160 states. 143 states guarantee – or at least guaranteed then – one or more freedom(s) of communication in their constitutions. In sixteen constitutions, freedom of speech was assured explicitly; in 21, the freedom of speech and opinion; in 58, the freedom of the press; in 60, the freedom of information; and in 103, freedom of opinion (Breunig 1994: 308).¹ However, as is often the case, it would be wrong to equate ‘quantities to qualities’. Even if freedom of the press is not explicitly mentioned, it does not mean that it does not exist. The term ‘press freedom’ is not found in the constitution of Sweden, for example, even though its press enjoys more freedom than in almost any other state on earth. And being printed in the constitution does, by no means, signify that it is implemented de facto. That is proven by the example of North Korea, ruled by one of the world’s most repressive regimes. Another example: the freedom of broadcasting is only mentioned in two of the constitutions analysed by Breunig’s expressis verbis: in the German ‘Grundgesetz’ – and in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Often, constitutions contain limitations to the chartered freedom of communication which ‘abrogate the positive content basic rights’ (Breunig 1994: 307). And it is not rare for arbitrariness to prevail despite any particular legislation. A comparative law analysis alone, therefore, can not offer sufficient insight into the media situation. This observation is further underscored by the fact that the basic understanding of press freedom can differ significantly.

In authoritarian systems press freedom is often subsidiary to other government aims. In the German Democratic Republic, for instance, one had to look upon freedom of the press as the freedom from economic constraint as well as the possibility (or rather the duty) of taking part in the build up of socialism (see, for example, Holzweißig 1997). In the Development Media Concept, which to this day is advocated at least implicitly in many states of the so-called Third World, the media are, to a certain extent, allocated the task to first and foremost cooperate in the formation of a nation after the era of colonization. According to this view, the media’s primary tasks are nation-building and, finally, contributing to social and economic development – pluralism and freedom of the press are often looked upon as second-rate, sometimes even as detrimental (Stevenson 1994: 231–59). For instance, in strongly religious-orientated states, the media almost voluntarily make a taboo out of numerous topics and events. In Turkey there is paragraph 301 of the penal law, which assesses ‘defamation of Turkishness’ as an element of offence – as many will be aware of after the murder of Hrant Dink and the arguments about Orhan Pamuk.

With reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it can be said that the press is free – but in many places and in many ways, it is in bonds. How can these bonds be more precisely defined? How can freedom of the press and the media situation be focused on in an international comparison?

Comparing media freedom around the world: A short inspection of four surveys Up until the last four or five years, internationally comparative media research did not, unfortunately, rank very highly, at least in German communication science. In 2002, Hans Kleinsteuber mentioned that it is in a ‘yet embryonic state’ (Kleinsteuber 2002: 42). Since then the situation has improved,² but even in the ‘strongholds’ of international media research, such as in the United States and in Great Britain, comparison has been only a side show of research for a long time. Methodical problems, such as the general question of various systems being comparable or the exact categories of comparison to be operationalized in comparative research, for the most part, still ,need to be clarified. There is a need for special clarification depending on the subject of research; the complexity is therefore high, the qualifications the researcher has to fulfil, immense. The British Media Researcher Sonia Livingstone points out: ‘In personal communication, comparative projects are described as “exhausting”, “a nightmare” and “frustrating”, though also “exhilarating” or “stimulating”’ (Livingstone 2003: 481). Cross-national comparisons are ‘exciting but difficult, creative but problematic’ (Livingstone 2003: 478). The field of studies is correspondingly clear. But currently the prominence of comparative media research is growing:

Funding bodies and policy imperatives increasingly favour comparative research. Stimulated also by the phenomena of globalization and the concomitant rise of globalization theory, researchers in media, communication and cultural studies increasingly find themselves initiating collaboration or invited to collaborate in multinational comparative projects. (Livingstone 2003: 477)

This general result applies also to freedom of the press as the subject of examination. Thus, for a long time, there were only a few international comparative studies to comply with exact scientific demands (see, for example, Holtz-Bacha 2003). In the last few years, this situation has become much better and there is a series of studies which attempt, sometimes extensively, international comparison of the limitations of press freedom. The concrete focus is somewhat different in each case, as is the research instrument.

I would brie y like to introduce four of these studies. I will describe their methodical approach and also mention problems or inevitable shortcomings. Finally, I would like to refer to a few of the results of these studies before reaching a conclusion. The four studies I will brie y present are:

‘Freedom of the Press: A Global Survey of Media Independence’ by Freedom House (last edition: Deutsch Karlekar 2007a)

‘World Press Freedom Index’ by Reporters Without Borders (2007b)

‘Media and Democracy Report’ by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (2005)

‘African Media Barometer’ by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in cooperation with the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) (2006/2007).

Other studies worth mentioning are, for example, ‘News Media and Freedom of Expression in the Arab Middle East’ edited by the Heinrich Boell Foundation (2004) and ‘The World Press Freedom Review’ of the International Press Institute (2006).

Freedom House: ‘Freedom of the Press’

Let us begin with the oldest established survey, the study by the Washington based NGO Freedom House, conducted annually since 1980: ‘Freedom of the Press: A Global Survey of Media Independence’. The survey considers communication and media freedom in more than 190 states, according to almost constant criteria and is an ‘important instrument for metering continuously the global development of press freedom’, as Christina Holtz-Bacha rightly emphasizes (Holtz-Bacha 2003: 408). The survey is published every year on 3 May, the ‘World Press Freedom Day’, when some media interest is guaranteed. The results are presented in form of brief country reports, an overview article (Deutsch Karlekar 2007b), sometimes some longer reports on special topics or problems, and always global and regional ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Structural Inhibition of Media Freedom and Plurality across Europe
• Part One: Concepts
• Part Two: Conditions (Case Studies)
• The Authors