PRESS FREEDOM AND DEVELOPMENT IN ASIA

In the Handbook of the Media in Asia (Gunaratne, 2000), I have argued that press freedom is not necessarily related to a set of so-called Asian values. Two ancient philosophical traditions—Chinese and Indian—going back to half a millennium before the Common Era, laid the foundation for a range of values. In Chinese philosophy, Daoism stood for extreme libertarianism; Confucianism for family values, education, and benevolent rule; Legalism for extreme authoritarianism; and Mohism for socialist ideals. In Indian philosophy, Hinduism stood for a benevolent monarchy, law and order, as well as relative freedom; and Buddhism stood for republican government, universal love, freedom of thought, and individual as well as collective responsibility (Gunaratne, 2001c). These represent a range of human values, which are also associated with Western civilization and Islam to varying degrees.

If we combine the contemporary political frameworks of Asian countries with their ancient philosophical and religious backgrounds, the following profiles emerge:

· Communist: Laos (Buddhist), China (Buddhist-Confucian), North Korea (Buddhist-Confucian) and Vietnam (Buddhist).

· Authoritarian (traditional monarchy, non-party presidential and military)): Bhutan (Buddhist), Maldives (Islamic), Brunei Darussalam (Islamic), Myanmar (Buddhist), and post-coup Pakistan (Islamic)

· Dominant party: Cambodia (Buddhist), Malaysia (Islamic), and Singapore (Buddhist-Confucian).

· Type II Parliamentary/presidential democracies with a relatively free media system: Mongolia (Buddhist), India (Hindu), post-Suharto Indonesia (Islamic), Sri Lanka (Buddhist), Bangladesh (Islamic), and Nepal (Hindu). China’s two SARs—Hong Kong and Macau—also fit in here.

· Type I Parliamentary/presidential democracies with a large degree of media freedom: Thailand (Buddhist), Philippines (Christian), South Korea (Buddhist-Confucian/Christian), Taiwan (Buddhist-Confucian) and Japan (Buddhist-Shinto).

What is remarkable in this classification is that the political categories cut across Asia’s major philosophies/religions. Buddhist-Confucian countries range from the freest to the most authoritarian. Islamic countries range from moderately free to authoritarian. With Nepal’s transition to democracy, the two Hindu countries have occupied the moderately free zone. Thus, the state of Asian politics does not represent a common set of Asian values founded on Asia’s principal philosophies/religions. As Datta-Ray (in Latif, 1998) says, the press is a creature of politics. The cry of “Asian values” has come most vociferously from two countries in the dominant-party category—Malaysia and Singapore—as well as Indonesia under Suharto as justification for taming the media. Freedom of expression is a human right, not a Western yardstick.

The first three models of the above five classifications represent varying degrees of authoritarianism rather than a value system common to all Asians. What is more important is to make the media system of a country more consistent with universal human values. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its covenants, as well as the NWICO vision of the MacBride Commission, provide the framework for promoting a socially responsible press in Asia and elsewhere. Pancasila, Rukunegara and similar national ideologies also can provide guidance for journalists within the UDHR framework. Debasing the watchdog function of the mass media as a Western-liberal value will not necessarily bring stability to nations in the long run. Case in point: Indonesia 1998.

Hamelink (in Hamelink & Mehra, 1990), however, points out that the universality of human rights could also mean the recognition of the concurrent existence of at least three concepts of those rights—the bourgeois/capitalist, the Marxist and the Islamic. But, he says, both the universalist and the relativist positions are fraught with risks. He argues: “Universalism may obscure a ‘human rights colonialism’ [that] abuses human rights as an instrument of foreign policy while relativism may imply an ethical relativism that amounts to moral indifference” (p. xvi). While the UDHR declares that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Article 19 of the ICCPR not only attaches special duties and responsibilities to it but also subjects it to legal restrictions related to areas such as defamation, national security, public health or morals, and public order. Although cultural values invariably affect the interpretation and implementation of human rights, the danger lies in the authoritarian-tending rulers’ exaggeration of those values to impose greater restrictions on individual freedoms.

Gunaratne (1976) contended that the media-subservience protagonists, who vehemently criticized the libertarian concept as an irrelevant Western norm, conveniently overlooked the Western contribution to the authoritarian concept, which they found so relevant to Asia and the rest of the developing world. Because authoritarianism was common in Europe as well, one may well ask: Did “Asian values” originate in medieval Europe? Gunaratne (1978) argued that “the democratic Third World governments could promote developmental journalism better through fostering a socially responsible independent press rather than through media subservience” (p. 6). Gunaratne (1993) wrote: “Democracy requires the press to point fingers and hurl accusations through thorough investigation. In the process, errors will inevitably occur” (p. 180). The solution, he suggested, was to promote ethics to hold down partisanship and sensationalism. In this sense, the proposal to standardize press ethics on a global scale (Venkateswaran, 1996, p. 10) is more pertinent to promote socially responsible journalism than the forced imposition of so-called “Asian values,” which rulers in medieval Europe also practiced.

The country profiles in the Handbook of the Media in Asia (Gunaratne, 2000) draw our attention to some significant trends in the development of media in Asian countries at the beginning of the millennium.

· The main proponents of the “Asian values” thesis—Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia under Suharto—are conceding greater media freedom because of the power of the Information Superhighway. Singapore, which aims to become Asia’s information hub, will have to gradually yield to the cyberspatial forces that are making a mockery of domestic censorship. Despite its all-encompassing Rukunegara philosophy, Malaysia has agreed to let cyberspace operate freely in the interest of making its Multimedia Super Corridor a success. Indonesia, which is in the process of building its vast Nusantara information highway, is de-linking itself from the all-encompassing Pancasila philosophy of the Suharto era.

· The communist or former-communist countries in Asia are making concessions to media freedom in varying degrees. North Korea is sticking to the Leninist model of the press with a touch of Kim Il Sung’s “anti-Japanese guerilla method.” The media propagate Kim’s Jucheism (self-help) as a national philosophy. On the other hand, the former communist Mongolia has taken giant strides to establish media freedom. China is in the process of redefining the role of the media. As more journalists enjoy more freedom with the commercialized media in China, they will require a legally guaranteed freedom. In Vietnam, “although newspapers are still either government-owned or affiliated and hence not dependent on advertising income, they are now aggressively competing for advertisers and readers.” In Laos, central censorship is no longer imposed on the press. Nevertheless, “ambiguity and caution prevail, and individual journalists generally censor their own stories according to their perceptions of the government's sensitivities.” (The quotes are from Gunaratne, 2000.)

· The press in Asia’s authoritarian countries also shows varying characteristics ranging from post-democratic ambivalence in (Musharraf-led) Pakistan to dictatorial determination in Myanmar. In Bhutan, the government has consistently considered the media as tools for promoting development; and dissent and the reporting of dissent are difficult. In the Maldives, the conventional wisdom among journalists and the governing elite is that any discussion on press freedom and press regulation should take into account the fragile and “homogeneous” structure of the Maldivian society. In Brunei, the press operates within the framework of the Malay Islamic Monarchy concept: The government controls “the media not primarily to keep them from harming the ruling elite, but to channel the power of the media into what the state sees as constructive educational, developmental and political goals.” In Myanmar, strict censorship rules are the norm: “Editors and publishers tend to avoid potentially objectionable writing and select only such materials that are likely to please the Press Scrutiny Board.” In Cambodia, even though government and party ownership of the press has rapidly declined, politics and violence have caused the erosion of press freedom. (The quotes are from Gunaratne, 2000.)

· The majority of the subcontinental bloc of countries in the SAARC group is straddling the middle of the press-freedom quandary. Despite being no better off than Sub-Saharan Africa economically, these countries are making more concessions to accommodate a freer press. Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh reverted from authoritarianism to democracy even though Pakistan has reneged[1]. Sri Lanka, however, has taken little action to dismantle the government ownership of the country’s largest newspaper group despite the ruling party’s 1994 election pledge to do so whereas Bangladesh and Pakistan have dissolved the government-owned press. India carries the honors for steadily following a press freedom policy marred only briefly during Indira Gandhi’s 1975-1977 emergency rule. Hong Kong, which also straddles the middle, is continuing to enjoy a high degree of press freedom as a SAR under China despite widely held predictions to the contrary. However, the media have lowered their standards under market-driven journalism leading to ethical concerns.

· Japan—along with Taiwan, South Korea, Philippines and Thailand—has a freer press than in the rest of Asia. Japan is concerned with issues such as the resale price maintenance system of the newspapers and digitization of broadcasting rather than censorship issues that plague most of Asia. In Taiwan, “the media critics’ major concern now is no longer the lack of press freedom but the lack of respect for it and increasingly confused ethical principles.” Intense competition prevails among the media in South Korea, where the democratization process set off in 1987 has enabled the media to be freer than ever to criticize the government and to cover issues. The Philippines has a constitutional guarantee that is very similar to the U.S. First Amendment. However, ethics has become a major concern with the deteriorating standards of media content and the active intrusion of politicians, including the former president, into journalistic roles. In Thailand, the 1997 constitution has brought a breath of fresh air to create an environment conducive to greater media freedom. (The quotes are from Gunaratne, 2000.)

In the preceding section, I have looked at press freedom as a domestic phenomenon in each country as if it were independent of the world system. Such an interpretation, often reflected in the Western assessments of world press freedom such as those of Freedom House, ignores the fact that the whole (the world system as a single unit) is more than the sum of its parts—an integral principle associated with Oriental philosophy (excluding Buddhism) and the world system theory (Gunaratne, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2001d).

I have argued that to ascertain the degree of freedom of opinion-outlets and expression (a broader concept that includes freedom of the press), one has to focus on three levels—the world system, the nation-state, and the individual (Gunaratne, 2000d). By so doing, one can derive the answers to the following: Can the world system inject news and opinion into a nation-state despite restrictions on endogenous (or internal) opinion-outlets—a term more inclusive than press or media—in that nation-state? Can individuals within nation-state access exogenous (or external) opinion-outlets despite restrictions on endogenous opinion-outlets in a nation state? To the extent that the answers to these two questions are in the affirmative, the measures of press freedom based on internal restrictions distort the reality.

The tendency in the West has been to associate press freedom with the characteristics of Siebert’s so-called libertarian theory of the press or the CHAOS—competition, heterogeneity, autonomy, openness, and selfishness—paradigm (Merrill, 2000). The purpose of a libertarian press is “to inform, entertain, [and] sell—but chiefly to help discover truth, and to check on government” (Siebert, Peterson & Schramm, 1956, p.7). Within this context, the press enjoys negative rights to publish as it pleases with no concomitant responsibilities. Peterson’s formulation of the social responsibility theory of the press, following the Hutchins Commission report, looks at press freedom as a positive right that entails concomitant responsibilities.

The Hutchins Commission (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947) has observed: “Freedom of the press is not a fixed and isolated value, the same in every society and in all times. It is a function within a society and must vary with the social context” (p. 12). Hocking (1947), in one of the five special studies done for the commission, emphasized the very point that the concept of the free press “cannot mean the same in every society and at all times” (p. 194). If this were the case, then measuring freedom of the press on the basis of a set of criteria relevant to one society at a given time is bound to produce questionable results. This view agrees with the contemporary debate on relating press freedom to Asian values and other social values outside Western society.

Freedom House, however, has been conducting press freedom surveys worldwide since 1979 classifying the media as free, partly free, or not free depending on the “degree to which each country permits the free flow of information” (Figure 1, Figure 2, and Figure 3 show Freedom House’s average press freedom scores for each country in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia for the period 1994-2000.) It claims that the survey uses universal criteria starting with the most “universal unit of concern: the individual” (Sussman, 2000, p. 9). Freedom House asserts that it merely applies the basic thrust of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (i.e., “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression”) in assessing press freedom.

(Freedom House measures only the extent to which the endogenous print and broadcast media can keep their content free from the influence of laws and regulations, political pressures and controls, and economic influences. It gives a score of 0 to 15 to each of the two types of media in relation to each of these three criteria. A fourth criterion, repressive actions, is scored 0 to 5 for each of the two media types. Thus the maximum possible score for a country is 100, with 0-30 defined as free, 31-60 as partly free, and 61-100 as not free. Freedom House admits that its survey is not a measure of press responsibility.)

Nordenstreng (1999), however, argues that under international law, the subject and “owner” of the “right to freedom of opinion and expression”—a right that “carries with it duties and responsibilities”—is the individual, not the press or media organizations (p. 256). Thus Nordenstreng makes a distinction between freedom of the press and freedom of individual expression thereby contending that press freedom is not a human right.

The International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems (MacBride Report, 1980) has pointed out the need to devote special attention “to obstacles and restrictions [that] derive from the concentration of media ownership, public or private, from commercial influences on the press and broadcasting, or from private or governmental advertising” (Recommendation 57). The commission also drew attention to the 1952 Convention on the International Right of Correction (Recommendation 48), thereby expressing its desire to place the right to communicate at the world system level. The concept of the right to communicate includes the right to be informed, the right to inform, the right to privacy, and the right to participate in public communication (Recommendation 54). Gunaratne (1998) has elaborated on the parallels between the views of the Hutchins Commission and the MacBride Commission on press freedom and responsibility. Two decades after the MacBride Report, the concentration of media ownership has become more pronounced as a result of several developments accentuating capital accumulation, e.g., the demise of the socialist bloc, and the U.S.-led worldwide promotion of free-market philosophy.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, the global media market has come under the domination of a dozen or so mega-media conglomerates, including AOL Time Warner (CNN), AT&T Broadband, Bertelsmann, Disney (ABC), General Electric (NBC), News Corp. (Fox TV), Sony (Columbia Pictures), Viacom (CBS), and Vivendi-Universal. Freedom of the press, contrary to what the framers of the First Amendment most likely had in mind, has moved away from the individual to the media conglomerates. As Curran and Park (2000) point out, under free-market conditions, a close alliance of big business, press, and government is poised to engender new systems of power inimical to the general public.[2]

At the world system level, these mega-media conglomerates, as well as government-funded opinion-outlets (e.g., Voice of America, BBC, Radio Moscow, Radio Beijing, Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale, and Radio Cairo) use satellites, cables, and airwaves to inject information and opinion into every nation-state. The world system pays particular attention to reach individuals in the most authoritarian countries. Western measurements of freedom of the press at the nation-state level take a negative view of government involvement with the press while discounting the effects of commercial interests on opinion and information censorship. Because big business and governments are highly involved in running opinion-outlets at the world-system level, doubts arise about the extent of freedom of opinion-outlets and expression at this level as well. (Although the Internet provides a means for the individual to impart and receive opinion at the world system level, the large majority of people in the world do not have access to the Internet because of telecommunication poverty.) In general, the Western measures of freedom of opinion outlets appear to overestimate the freedom in Western countries and underestimate the freedom in non-Western countries.

I have theorized that an accurate measure of freedom of opinion-outlets worldwide would constitute a normal distribution (Gunaratne, 2001c). Such a distribution would represent libertarianism at one end and authoritarianism at the other. These two concepts make up the yin-yang complements in Chinese philosophy or the thesis-antithesis antinomy in the Hegelian dialectic. The clash of the antinomy engendered by cultural values produces varying degrees of social responsibility. This humanocentric theory of opinion-outlets and free expression owes much to both Oriental and Occidental philosophies (Figure 4 and Figure 5). It recognizes the state of flux in the world system, where the concepts themselves continuously go through a natural process of change. Neither libertarianism nor authoritarianism is likely to be the norm in the world system.

The percentage of countries identified by Freedom House as free, partly free, and not free form almost a normal curve when the free and not-free categories are adjusted to separate the extremes (Figure 6). However, the distribution of the average of freedom scores for each country produces a distribution that is both positively and negatively skewed—a result of Freedom House’s overestimating the freedom in Western countries and underestimating the freedom in non-Western countries (Figure 7).

The world system theory classifies the nation-states into a center, a semiperiphery, and a periphery based on competitive capital accumulation. Because the periphery constitutes the large majority of nation-states, the distribution of countries reflecting economic power would form a positively skewed curve compared with the theorized normal distribution of nation-states reflecting freedom of opinion-outlets. Figure 8 shows the highly skewed distribution of the Gross National Income per capita for 166 countries for which the World Bank provides the data. Theoretically, therefore, a significant correlation cannot exist between competitive capital accumulation (viz., economic development) and freedom of opinion-outlets.

Development, however, stands for more than competitive capital accumulation. The Human Development Index of the U.N. Development Program is widely accepted as a more accurate index of development because, in addition to real GNI per capita, it takes into consideration three other factors: life expectancy at birth, adult literacy rate, and the combined first, second-and third-level gross enrolment ratio. Table 1 shows a statistically non-significant correlation of –0.36 (p = 0.1) between Freedom House’s press freedom scores and UNDP’s Human Development Index for Asian countries. Thus we have to conclude that press freedom as measured by Freedom House is not necessarily associated with development. For instance, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, and Malaysia score well on HDI but not on freedom of opinion-outlets. However, most developed countries are associated with greater freedom of opinion-outlets.

  Press Freedom Average (1994-2001)
  and Human Development Index (1999)
         for Asian Countries

Another noteworthy fact is that Freedom House’s ratings on freedom of opinion-outlets fail to show a statistically significant correlation with political participation as reflected in voter turnout at national elections (r = --0.02; p = 0.83) for all the countries for which data are available (Gunaratne, 2001d). This is all the more disconcerting because a basic rationale behind the clamor for freedom of opinion-outlets is to promote democratic participation. Perhaps this may mean that the established opinion-outlets are more concerned with capital accumulation than on enlightening public opinion. Extreme libertarianism devoid of social responsibility can be as inimical as extreme authoritarianism. The answer may lie in Buddha’s “middle path,” Aristotle’s “pursuit of the mean, the Confucian “doctrine of the mean,” or Hegel’s “synthesis.”

At the very outset of this paper, I made a case for greater freedom of opinion-outlets in Asia. The lack of a statistically significant correlation between freedom of opinion-outlets and human development, as well as political participation, does not justify making further incursions into freedom of expression, which is a universal human right that has the support of both Oriental and Occidental philosophy.

[1] Pakistan reverted to military rule on Oct. 12, 1999, when Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, declared a state of emergency and appointed himself the country’s chief executive. Thus Pakistan has moved back to the authoritarian category.

[2] Gerbner (1993) elaborates on two case studies to document the power of the U.S. business-press-government power-axis to distort press coverage of global realities, especially in areas affecting the media’s own interests: first, the press performance before, during, and after the adoption of the Unesco Mass Media Declaration in 1978; and second, the general U.S. press coverage of the 1982 Unesco conference that preceded the United States’ withdrawal from Unesco (p. 111).

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