Editorial: Freedom of press needs protecting

We live in an age when every day of the year seemingly is dedicated to one cause or another. Today happens to be World Press Freedom Day. Aside from a handful of journalists reflecting for a few moments on the plight of their colleagues paying a high price for their craft under repressive regimes, who will attach more significance to this day than they do to Groundhog Day? The answer: too few.

The vast majority of New Zealanders, if they give the matter any thought, fleetingly acknowledge that we are a free society and, therefore, have no cause for concern on that score. Some are detached from the subject altogether, regarding press freedom as a matter for the press. However one looks at it, there is no public sense of jealous guardianship because press freedom - or, more correctly, freedom of expression - is taken for granted.

How safe is complacency? Can society, because it does not perceive any direct and immediate threat to itself, be satisfied to leave well enough alone? If, as the saying goes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance then the answer must be "no". And the experience of New Zealand media in recent years suggests that vigilance would be well-advised. While no journalist has been thrown in jail, no newspaper closed down by Government decree, there is a relentless tendency to subordinate press freedom whenever free expression may be inconvenient to some Government project. The consequence could be death by a thousand pin-pricks,

Little by little - a regulation here and a legislative clause there - the concept of a free flow of information is being eroded. Often with a reasonable intention in mind, politicians and officials have attempted to enact measures that restrict access to material. It may be in the name of privacy or to restrict the use of information for such things as direct marketing, but legitimate restraints have had illegitimate fallout. Journalists' access to information has been constrained. Other measures have been aimed directly at journalists and their outlets.

That, one might believe, is the journalists' problem, but such an impression would be ill-judged. The reporter's quest for facts is to satisfy the public's right to know. Restrict access to information and that right is abused. Freedom of information is not only in a journalist's interest, it is in the public interest.

In the past 300 years, the notion of a free press as an essential ingredient of democracy has grown to the point where it is embedded in numerous constitutional frameworks. No American child grows up without knowing that the founding fathers decreed, in the First Amendment to their constitution, that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging freedom of speech, or of the press". That article of the Bill of Rights has been cited throughout United States legal history as the protective mechanism against restrictions on free expression. It is a right that the American people have jealously guarded.

It would be an interesting exercise to determine how many New Zealand children (or New Zealanders generally) know of our equivalent statute. Section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act states that "everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the right to seek, receive and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form".

Unfortunately, our "safeguard" lacks the supreme force of the First Amendment. Parliament, unlike Congress, can usurp the freedom. And, as the aborted attempt before the 2002 election to reintroduce criminal libel indicated, the Government is not above doing so.

Press Freedom Day may pass without popular fanfare here. Other nations, meanwhile, will look longingly at what we have. So the value attached to freedom of information may be in inverse proportion to its availability. Prick it too often and it becomes a very valuable commodity indeed.