The Illusion of the Free Press (original) (raw)

The Free Press: Necessary Illusions.docx

Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2019

This article claims that the relevance of the ‘truth argument’ to free speech theory is based on an illusion. According to some critical perspectives this illusion consists in the false belief that a free press is a proper means for the mediation of social reality. The Critique of the Political Economy of the Press attributes it to the modes of production of the press in capitalist systems. Some cultural theorists, on the other hand, claim that the press cannot adequately represent reality because reality is non-representable. Building upon but superseding these approaches, this article affirms that the illusion of the free press is not merely a false idea of what the press really is. The illusion is – in contrast – an epistemological necessity: we need the illusion of a free press in order to retain the belief of a correspondence between the world that appears through the press and that same world as it is in itself.

Some Beliefs About Press Freedom

Media Dialogues – Medijski dijalozi

This article intends to rectify three popular beliefs related to press freedom: that the idea of a free marketplace of ideas with a self-righting truth belongs to original liberalism,that UNESCO's primary mission is to promote freedom of information, and that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides legal safeguards for the media. These beliefs are shown, on the basis of the legacy of liberalism and documents of the international community, to be misleading myths. The Millennium Declaration provides further proof that the international community has a much more balanced view of freedom of information than that typically held by media professionals.

The Dialectics of Press (Un)Freedom

Press Freedom: A Training Manual, 2022

The chapter details the historical context of challenges to press freedom in setting the context for subsequent modules designed for educating all stakeholders on the challenges to press freedom and how to better guarantee it

Freedom of the press and oppression of journalists

This paper was published in Le Mauricien – Forum newspaper. It is about freedom of the press. It is well known that journalists and editorialists are being oppressed in some totalitarian countries. In addition to that, they are not immune from over-zealous judicial opinions fouled with bias, besides adverse public opinions. As such journalism is a profession that is extremely vulnerable to risks, victimisations, moral harrassment, and condemnations.

Freedom and Truth in Public Sphere, and the Contest of Fake News

International journal for innovation education and research, 2021

It aims to address the freedom of speech issue from a Kantian point of view, based on the concepts about public use of reason and thinking for oneself, the required conditions for publicity and its relation to fair, as opposed to the unfair and the lie. Moreover, this study addresses the problem of factual truth within the political sphere linked to the use of lies in the different means of communication, and how the fake news reveal themselves as dangerous to the current democratic states, it has, regarding this point, as the main theoretical framework Hannah Arendt's teachings.