The right to speak freely

The adoption of the Harare Declaration marked increasing determination within the Commonwealth to improve the quality of democracy. But none of the Declarations relating to good governance and democracy explicitly refers to freedom of expression, and heads of government have been unwilling to spell out this freedom. In a democracy the function of the media is to make politicians uncomfortable and, since independence, journalists in many Commonwealth countries have shown considerable professional bravery in resisting pressures from the new regimes determined to ensure favourable treatment. But in many countries attritionover the years has produced media that are compliant, cowed or controlled. The author reviews the consequent general deterioration in the quality of the media across the Commonwealth, and examines the extent to which this generalization applies to specific nations where investigative journalism is non-existent and journalists depend on information provided by Government press offices. But domination by Government is not the only threat to media freedom, which can also be compromised by the concentration of ownership in the hands of a few multinationals and reliance on global sources of information

Commonwealth · Corporate governance · Declaration · Democracy · Economics · Freedom of information · Freedom of the press · Good governance · Government (linguistics · Independence (probability theory · Journalism · Management · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Quality (philosophy · Sociology · Spell · Commonwealth, Australian Politics and Federalism · Law