Press Performance, Human Rights, and Private Power as a Threat

Abstract

The essay concerns the manner private power threatens the proper democratic role of the press or mass media. But first, Part I examines two preliminary conceptual matters involved in locating this discussion in the context of a conference on private power as a threat to human rights: 1) the relation of human rights to private power in general. This relation is complicated due to fact that human rights can themselves be seen as the assertion of private power against government or against collective power while, depending on how conceptualized, human rights can be improperly threatened by private power even while private power operates in a generally lawful manner; 2) involves the relation of press freedom and human rights. Here I argue that human rights are ill-conceived if offered as embodying any particular right in respect to the press—more specifically, I argue that a free press is not a human right—but argue instead that an ideal media order that is embodied in a broad conception of free press provides the soil in which human rights can flourish and the armor that offers them protection. Both government power and private power are necessary for and constitute threats to these supportive roles of a free press.Political-legal theory—or in constitutional democracies, possibly constitutional theory—should offer some guide to how the tightrope between government as threat and government as source of protection against private threats ought to be walked. That is, the goal is to find both proper limits on government power and proper empowerment of government to respond to private threats. Part II examines the variety of private threats to the proper role of the press. It focuses on two forms of threats: first, market failures that can be expected in relatively normal functioning of the market; second, problems related to the purposeful use of concentrated economic power. Responsive policies are multiple—no magic bullet but varying different governmental (as well as private) responses are appropriate. However, Part III illustrates this point by considering only two types of governmental policies, both of which I have recently been involved in advocating: first, government promotion of dispersal of concentrated power by means of ownership rules and policies; second, tax subsidies in the form of tax credits for a significant portion of journalists salaries as a means to correct for underproduction of journalism on theory that this journalism generally produces significant positive externalities.