- Foremost English champion of Press freedom
During the great eighteenth century parliamentary debates over freedom of speech and independence of the Press, British PM William Pitt the Elder famously remarked of John Wilkes, a radical, journalist and disagreeable political rival that, while he hated Wilkes personally, he supported him in the struggle for Press reforms, ‘because he (Pitt) loved freedom more than he hated Wilkes’. The US Founding Fathers, always wary of a powerful future government, unequivocally forbade Congress to make laws which abridged the freedom of speech or of the Press, through the First Amendment, adopted on December 15, 1791, which provision has since provided a stern sentinel against any attempt to fetter the American media. The Wilkes quote that ‘liberty of the press is birthright of a Briton, and is justly esteemed to be the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country’, is broadly interpreted today as being the ‘birthright of each and every citizen… and of the community as a whole’. It is supposed to be a fundamental constitutional principle of democracy, and if free speech is confined within statutory or regulatory bounds imposed by rulers, then ‘democracy dies in darkness’.
In Pakistan, alarm was lately mounting among the media over blatantly increasing ‘unofficial’ interference by various state bodies and institutions, usually of a scary nature, on any reportage considered unpalatable, that sometimes led to a court appearance, or forcible ‘missing in action’ status for the recalcitrant journalist for a few days, or worse. Now the federal government is itself forcefully muscling in the media suppression business through its proposed Print Regulatory Authority, apparently a dominant monolith body presiding over all aspects of the media and laying down the law, while operating under the prejudiced gaze of the ministry of information, instead of the less directly involved Cabinet Division. The journalist community was not even consulted. This augurs ill at a time when the print media is already swimming against the economic tide, in the ubiquitous presence of electronic and social media , confusing and divisive ‘fake news’ are all the rage, and ‘all the news that’s fit to print’, or journalistic integrity, has become much more than a mere flag mast catchphrase.
