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E
s s a y b y J a c k F u l l e r
An
editor or publisher from the United States does not have to attend
many Inter American Press Association meetings before the humbling
recognition occurs to him that journalists and publishers from other
countries often have to risk much more than we do in defending the
freedom of the press. For most of us from the United States, the
most we?ve ever been called upon to do is to take the chance of
being briefly and symbolically jailed until a court renders the
punishment invalid under the U.S. Constitution. Or we have had to
fight a libel or privacy case; the stakes may be high, but they
are only money, and the law surrounds us with defenses. It
is different in many parts of Latin America. Journalists and publishers
often, quite literally, have to be heroes if they want to publish
the truth. The government may threaten them; the legal system may
not protect them. Or they might face violence from faceless men,
perhaps acting on behalf of someone powerful, who do their deed
and are never brought to justice for it. Even their families are
sometimes in peril. Though
we are at a historical moment of extraordinary human possibility,
with democratic institutions developing in so very many places,
each country is different, each legal system is different. As this
remarkable volume shows, it is difficult to generalize about the
state of freedom of the press in the hemisphere. Each individual
system bears the marks of its own unique history. Each democratic
institution has arisen out of unique social, cultural and political
circumstances. But it is absolutely vital for everyone who is interested
in press freedom to have access to information about the varied
nature of the threat and of the legal protections that are most
central to protecting against it. Though
the struggle for freedom of the press in the United States may seem
relatively painless to many of our Latin American colleagues, there
are some very serious challenges. Foremost,
the government persists in placing restrictions on broadcast media
that would be obviously unconstitutional if applied to newspapers.
Ownership, for example, is controlled under strict and complicated
rules rather than being subject to standard antitrust principles.
There is even a rule prohibiting a newspaper from acquiring a broadcast
outlet in its market or a broadcast outlet from acquiring a newspaper,
so in effect the troubling elements of government control of broadcasting
have spilled over into the printed press. The
only justification for such restrictions of broadcasting is now
an anachronism. It was based on the idea that the radio spectrum
over which signals are distributed is so limited that those granted
the ability to use it have received a government-sanctioned monopoly
and thus are subject to government controls. But today it is preposterous
to think that the distribution of television and radio is in any
way limited by the physics of the radio spectrum. Signals reach
people over cable, for example, offering the audience scores of
choices at every moment. They reach people over telephone lines.
They are distributed over the Internet. They are distributed directly
via satellite. There has never been such a profusion of ways for
people to communicate, and yet the government still says broadcasting
has a monopoly that must be controlled. You cannot help but conclude
that the real reason is that, as is true in so many other societies,
the government simply does not want to surrender power over the
media. Another
major problem is not so much legal as social. There is a sense among
many observers that the American public feels less committed than
in previous decades to the ideal of freedom of the press. This manifests
itself in huge jury verdicts, in hostility to press practices, and
ultimately in support for legal limitations on press freedom. The
press must and is examining its own behavior to see how it has alienated
large segments of the public. But a broad public education effort
is probably also called for. Otherwise the legal protections for
which journalists in the United States should be grateful may begin
to erode for want of broad public support.
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