The Journalist’s Power and Responsibility

Today’s media has command over a greater breadth and depth of information than ever. It enjoys unprecedented levels of technology and capital and reaches billions of people. With the ideological wars of the Cold War behind most of the world, it is less politically or legally fettered than ever in most places. If Francis Bacon’s dictum “knowledge is power” remains true - and it certainly does - then the media today is surely more powerful than ever.

But what exactly is the journalist’s responsibility? There are no doubt many formulations, but let me share with you one advanced by Mahatma Gandhi - a man who very effectively used newspapers over the span of his life to improve governance in his own country, change attitudes around the globe, and make the world a better place. He cast the journalist’s responsibility as “(1) to understand the popular feeling and give expression to it, (2) to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments, and (3) fearlessly to expose defects.” To be sure, each of these objectives sometimes conflicts with another, testifying to the complexity of the journalist’s task. But it is hard to imagine any proper journalistic effort that does not draw on one or more of these objectives.

Global Acceptance of Free Speech

Freedom of expression is a fundamental right is axiomatic in the modern world; Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Unifying diverse, even conflicting political regimes, the Declaration was ratified in 1948 by proclamation of the UN General Assembly with no opposing votes.

The great American Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed its rationale and centrality to the Constitution in a famous opinion in 1919. He concluded that “the ultimate good” was best reached by “a free trade in ideas… that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

The Zimbabwean Constitution describes freedom of expression at some length in its Article 20. In the case of In Re Munhumeso in 1992, the Zimbabwean Supreme Court cast freedom of expression as a “vitally important right” that lies “at the foundation of a democratic society” and is a “basic condition for the progress of society and the development of persons.” According to the Court, freedom of expression serves four broad purposes: (1) it helps an individual to obtain self-fulfillment; (2) it assists in the discovery of truth; (3) it strengthens the capacity of an individual to participate in decision making; and (4) it provides a mechanism for establishing a reasonable balance between stability and social change.

Relationship Between Free Speech and Economic Prosperity

In a society where freedom of expression is tolerated, open debate can flourish. In a competitive marketplace of ideas, all ideas - in large part by and through an energetic media - can be aired and the best rise to the top. For governments, this dynamic process yields policies that best account for conflicting variables, policies that balance the interests of all groups. Such policies maximize the effectiveness of economic players - buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, regulators and the regulated, individuals and corporations. The result instills confidence in domestic and international investors to act in such a climate. The whole open process drives growth, builds prosperity, and - advancing individual self-fulfillment.

Of course, in today’s complicated, interconnected global economy, even open societies can still get policies wrong. But freedom of expression is a central self-correcting mechanism in such societies. When the consequences of bad policies emerge, a free press covers the outcry from affected groups. The party in power learns to adjust its policies. If the party doesn’t and conditions deteriorate sufficiently, democratic systems allow informed citizens to vote that party out, and a new government comes to power with the chance to try different ideas. In this way, an open society gives its leadership a chance to learn and to adapt to a constantly changing and ever more competitive world at a pace that suits the people.

Beyond the policy front, freedom of expression is also a crucial element in a functioning market economy on the microeconomic level. Indeed, “free flow of information” is an essential element of definitions of “perfect competition” and “market economy” in classic economic theory. Investors, companies, and individuals can’t make informed economic decisions in their interest without free access to information. Thus, an important political right is also a pivotal economic mechanism.

Again, as in the case of economic policy, the logic of free speech’s underpinning of economic prosperity on the micro level is not complicated. If producers and consumers do not operate in a transparent system with information flowing freely between and among them, pricing mechanisms will always be distorted to the detriment of society as a whole. In some cases, prices will be “too high”, resulting in consumers spending more of their disposable income - at the expense of other consumption - and getting less. If you have to spend all your available money to buy petrol at black market prices, you will have to forego something else. In some cases prices will be “too low”, resulting in wide shortages and disinvestment by producers. When the price of sugar is frozen by regulation below its cost to the shopkeeper, for example, sugar disappears from the shelves and consumers must do without.

Innumerable distortions emerge in this environment: shortages of basic commodities such as food, fuel, and foreign exchange; unfair two-tiered pricing, with artificially cheap prices for elites and steep black market prices for those not politically favored; diversion of increasingly scarce private resources from productive investment to basic consumption; diversion of increasingly scarce public and private resources to import what the economy can no longer produce; resistance by elites with a stake in an inefficient and unfair system to any efforts to change that system.

Without a free flow of information, the privileged few who have access to and control of information can manipulate information flows to benefit themselves at the expense of the majority. While such a system enriches a very few, it impoverishes the vast majority and undermines a society’s overall economic prosperity. In nearly all cases, the system of restricted access to information serves as a foundation for corruption on a massive scale that misallocates societal resources and widens the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

In all cases, efficiency and productivity suffer. While it is today fashionable in some quarters to declare that the laws of supply and demand can be suspended at will, you don’t need a PhD in economics to understand that this flaunts human nature - people understand their interests and act accordingly.

Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank and Nobel Prize winner in economics for his work on asymmetries of information, concludes that corruption is more of an economic issue than a political one. Noting that economists - and really, all of us - oppose “artificially created scarcities”, he calls secrecy in the economy an artificially created scarcity of knowledge. Artificially created scarcities - in this case of knowledge - give rise to rent-seeking opportunities. These in turn give rise to corruption, as it becomes easier and less risky to make a fast dollar by exploiting your access to information than to produce goods or services.

Stiglitz’s work has been instrumental in moving transparency and the vital economic function of a free press to the center of international financial institutions’ agenda for poverty reduction in the developing world. The World Bank, for example, is now training some 1,000 journalists in investigative reporting, precisely because of the media’s crucial role in advancing prospects for improved governance and poverty reduction in their countries.

Lessons of History

History has shown time and again that an environment that fosters freedom of expression is an essential pillar to support the economic development of any people. The contrasting experiences of East and West during the Cold War offer compelling evidence of the centrality of free speech to economic prosperity. In the 1950s, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev famously told the Free World: “we will bury you.” But the ensuing decades saw the Free World achieve unprecedented levels of prosperity while the Communist Bloc suffered technological backwardness, declining health standards, and failure even to maintain food self-sufficiency. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 on the eve of the final collapse of Stalinism, President Reagan underscored the one great and inescapable conclusion of that era: “Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.”

Six years ago, then Georgian President and ex-Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze eloquently punctuated this point on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day. He wrote: “The greatest achievement of humanity - freedom of speech - has served [as] both the source and the incentive of progress… Today… hardly any nation can call itself civilized unless its citizens enjoy genuine freedom of speech… I firmly believe that the moral and political failure of the communist system was largely due to the suppression of this natural right, for it is no overstatement to say that free access to information is as crucial to human happiness and development as are water and bread for the physical survival of humankind. Suppression of free thought inevitably results in an accumulation of colossal amounts of negative energy that will ultimately smash every wall erected by a totalitarian system or dictatorship.”

I’m sure you’d find agreement on Shevardnadze’s analysis throughout much of Eastern Europe, where the citizens of Poland, Hungary, the Baltics and other nations are enjoying job creation, rising incomes and economic abundance at levels undreamed of before the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. This is not the result of development assistance or balance of payment supports. For the most part, their turnaround was the product of a citizenry exploiting political and economic freedoms not previously enjoyed. For sure, international assistance can aid development, but the growing wealth of Eastern European nations is primarily the result of expanding freedom - including freedom of speech and unfettered access to information - unleashing-the potential of the citizens of these countries. In other words, government got out of the way of its public and let real markets develop. Equally importantly, the political process became more inclusive so government became more responsive and accountable.

The experience of the East Asian tigers over the last two decades buttresses the lesson that building a strong policy framework on freedom of expression, among other freedoms, will drive impressive economic growth. Tellingly, glaring exceptions to that pattern in East Asia are countries that suffer the lowest levels of political and economic free speech in East Asia. Burma is a country as rich as any in natural resources but handicapped by a government that brooks no dissent and imposes a heavy hand in economic affairs. Another exception is North Korea, which by trying to enforce uniformity of thought has guaranteed a food-insecure and impoverished people. Not coincidentally, Burma and North Korea are two of just a handful of countries publicly described by U.S. Secretary of State Rice as the world’s remaining “outposts of tyranny.”

Remarks by U. S. Ambassador Christopher W. Dell to the School of Journalism at the National University of Science and Technology, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.