Freedom of Press

From an online encyclopedia (Wikipedia), the article defines freedom of press as giving the complete right for everyone to express his/her opinions and point of view in writing or in any kind of expression. Freedom of press extends to cover freedom of information gathering and news distribution as well. Freedom of press was practiced highly in some countries and lowly in some other countries. In 2003, Finland, Iceland, Netherlands, and Norway ranked the best practice of freedom of press. In 2004 however, besides the mentioned countries, Denmark, Ireland, Slovakia, and Switzerland joined in the top list of the best practice of the freedom of press while North Korea, Cuba, Burma, Turkmenistan, Eritrea, China, Vietnam, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, and Iran ranked the worst practice of press freedom with North Korea as the top. At practicing freedom of press, journalists are completely accountable of what they write if they were given their complete rights at the first place. In other word, in the article Code of Ethics: National Associations of Journalists, as a part of the journalists’ rights, “A journalist cannot be forced to do an act or express an opinion that would be contrary to his convictions or his conscience. In such a case, he will invoke the clause of conscience and the accompanying benefits.” However, what is being published is not only the journalist’s accountability, but also the media’s. In this article Associate Media and Publications Officer (AMPO) the media’s editors and publications officers are accountable to supervise what is being published considering some issues that deal with the culture and government’s regulations. Moving to the media’s role in democracy, the media is an important part of democracy, but probably a negative part of it. In this article Rich Media, Poor Democracy, Robert W. McChesney says that the media was one of the factors that led the U.S. democracy to reach to a woeful state. The powerful media make decisions with an unaware public. “The corporate media cement a system whereby the wealthy and powerful few make the most important decisions with virtually no informed public participation,” McChesney says. A huge number of essential political issues and events are not covered by the media and many others are filtered to match some purposes removing the essential notion of “public-be-informed.” Media’s decision on how to interpret and distribute news or information could also depends on certain biases such as ethnic (racial), class, political, and corporate biases to achieve specific goals that an owner or the elite desires. In conclusion, what happened in Kenya reflects exactly the crisis of press usage. The Kenyan government’s decision to arrest the three journalists probably wasn’t right, but it wasn’t wrong either. In order for a newspaper or any other media tool to survive, journalists and media officers must be aware of the practice of press freedom and must be also aware of government’s regulations and policies. Arresting the three Kenyan journalists for criticizing the Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki work doesn’t mean that information they sent to the public was wrong, it could be 100 % valid. However, what seemed to be wrong is that they weren’t meant to communicate it to the public.