Most journalists like to equate the “people’s right to know” with the traditional concept of “freedom of the press”. And most Government officials, looking at the situation from another perspective, are not so sure; they tend to have questions about a people’s right to know and wonder just where the people get such a right.
Government tends to conceive of press freedom as basically no prior censorship by Government or at least by the legislative branch of the Government, and that is about the scope of it. Government sees nothing in the Constitution or anywhere else-except perhaps on editorial pages -that says that it should give out to the press (or to the “people”) everything that goes on in its complex institutionalised system-
John Hohenberg, speaking about the role of a free press deplores the lack of public access to the media in these words: “The press, of course, continues to publish a handful of letters to the editor daily, and usually more on Sundays. But for all practical purposes, public access to the news media is even more limited than public access to office-holders. People do have a chance to see a congressman or an alderman, a mayor or a judge, at election time, but how many-outside small towns have ever seen the editor of their local newspaper? Let alone talk with him! ..The fact is that, with a number of brilliant exceptions, too many newspapers in every open society still pay insufficient attention to minority causes and unpopular opinions generally. Righteousness is rationed in too large a section of the press and the unpopular critics and the minorities are the first to say so.”
Friedrich Hayek while dealing with the issue of intellectual freedom says : “To deprecate the value of intellectual freedom because it will never mean for everybody the same possibility of independent thought is completely to miss the reasons which give intellectual freedom its value What is essential to make it serve its function as the prime mover of intellectual progress is not that everybody may be able to think or write anything but that any cause or idea may be argued by somebody.
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So long as dissent is not suppressed, there will always be some who will query the ideas ruling their contemporaries and put new ideas to the test of argument and propaganda”
The Role of Public Opinion:
Karl Jaspers has come to the conclusion that editors die more and more willing to compromise their authenticity by making decisions on the basis of what their publishers say, what some kind of their colleagues say, or what some kind of “mass desire” their readers are presumed to have.
The masses and “public opinion” are more important in journalism than ever before, with journalistic leadership eroding before the pervasive glorification of mass desires and “socially significant forces”. Jaspers contends that such concern for the masses is nothing more than “a sophistical instrument for the manufacture of vain enterprises, for fleeing from oneself, for evading responsibility, and for renouncing the attempt to climb toward true humanhood”.
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The Growth of “Mass Mindedness”:
As individualism declines, the collectivities that take over nationalise their depreciation of the person by calling forth the utilitarian argument of the most good to the most people. Such diverse writers as Ortega Gasset, Erich Fromm and Eric Hoffer have, in recent years, warned about the loss of individualism and a drift to collectivism and robotization where giant entities or institutions- political, economic and social-guide the destinies of individual persons with a firm but impersonal hand.
In such a situation, smaller entities are gobbled up by larger ones, just as persons are swallowed by institutionalised collectivities. Journalists are consumed by newspapers and broadcasting networks, while newspapers and networks become prey to powerful political and economic powers.
Listen again to Jaspers, writing specifically about the press: “If the Press is to pay, it must enter more and more into the service of political and economic powers. Under such controls, pressmen cultivate the art of deliberate living and indulge in propaganda on behalf of masters repugnant to their higher selves. They have to write to order.”