Archive for December 2007
Press freedom and social stability — of cake, and half-baked assumptions
I’ve actually got a few issues that I want to blog about, but let me focus on just one: the BBC World Service Poll on press freedom. Some pertinent links here:
- BBC World News, “World ‘divided’ on press freedom” (10 December 2007)
- BBC, BBC World Service Poll: World Divided on Press Freedom, (10 December 2007) (“BBC Report”) (1.86MB .pdf file)
- Todayonline.com, “Social stability is key: Poll” (11 December 2007)
- Readings From a Political Duo-ble, “Singaporeans for Free Media?”
- theonlinecitizen, “A government-controlled media is superior to a free media?”
Anyway, these are the portions of the BBC Report I wish to address:
GlobeScan President Doug Miller comments, “While people generally support a free media, the Western view of the necessity of a free press to ensure a fair society is not universally shared across all regions of the world.” (p. 3, BBC Report)
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Freedom of the Press vs. Social Stability
People across 14 countries were asked to choose which of two statements on the freedom of the media was closest to their own view:
- Freedom of the press to report the news truthfully is very important to ensure we live in a fair society, even if it sometimes leads to unpleasant debates or social unrest.
- While freedom of the press to report news truthfully is important, social harmony and peace are more important which sometimes means controlling what is reported for the greater good.
In most countries, press freedom is considered more important than stability. The exceptions are India, Singapore and Russia where around 48 percent support controls to ensure peace and stability and around 40 percent feel press freedom supersedes stability. (p. 5, BBC Report)
I will attempt to deal with the normative, rather than the positive: should press freedom or social stability be regarded as more important?
Why blogging is not the antidote to illiberalism.
And so, I’ve again reneged on a promise to blog more frequently. I’ve been working / interning, so much of my day is consumed by the mundane. Some of my time at home is also devoted to editing and proof-reading any number of soon-to-be-published academic articles. Plus, I’ve also been catching up on my reading on legal philosophy, so outside of work, I’m usually in a ruminatory frame of mind, not at all conducive to dolling out trenchant social critiques.
One of the books I’ve been reading is Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com (not the latest edition, Republic.com 2.0, which I must get my hands on). His basic thesis is a provocative and counter-intuitive one: government should regulate the Internet in order to promote freedom of speech. His supporting arguments are too intricate to be set out in full here.
An important cornerstone of his view, however, is that there is a distinction between ‘freedom’ in the sense of consumer sovereignty, and ‘freedom’ in the sense of a true deliberative democracy. Left to their own devices, people will choose based on their pre-existing inclinations, i.e. as mere consumers of information. These inclinations, however, are the very product of the environment we happen to be placed in.
