Privacy and Media Freedom


Book Description

A critical examination of the balance between the freedom of the media and the legal protection of privacy, this book examines the struggle to reconcile privacy and freedom of expression in the face of the increasingly sensationalist media, and the relentless advances in technology.




Comparative Defamation and Privacy Law


Book Description

Leading experts from common law jurisdictions examine defamation and privacy, two major and interrelated issues for law and media.




Media Law for Journalists


Book Description

This book is both an introductory text and reference guide to the main issues facing journalists today, including social media, fake news, and regulators. The text covers the law of the United Kingdom – including Scots and Northern Irish devolved legislation – as well as human rights and EU laws. This book covers essential areas such as: privacy, confidentiality, freedom of expression and media freedom, defamation, contempt of court, regulation of the print press and broadcast regulation as well as discussions on fake news and how to regulate online harm. There is a section on intellectual property law, covering mainly copyright. Court reporting and how to report on children, young people and victims of sexual offences receive particular attention in this book with relevant cases in user-friendly format. The engaging writing style is aimed to enthuse students, practitioners and lecturers with plenty of examination and practice materials. The text is packed with extensive learning aids including case studies, boxed notes, sample examination questions, appendices of statutes and cases and a glossary. It is intended as a complete course textbook for students and teachers of journalism, media, communications and PR courses, focusing on diploma courses, NCTJ examinations and broadcast journalism courses such as the BJTC. The book’s international focus would also make it ideal reading for journalists from across the world who are working in the UK. The book presumes no prior legal knowledge.




Networked Press Freedom


Book Description

Reimagining press freedom in a networked era: not just a journalist's right to speak but also a public's right to hear. In Networked Press Freedom, Mike Ananny offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. Ananny challenges the idea that press freedom comes only from heroic, lone journalists who speak truth to power. Instead, drawing on journalism studies, institutional sociology, political theory, science and technology studies, and an analysis of ten years of journalism discourse about news and technology, he argues that press freedom emerges from social, technological, institutional, and normative forces that vie for power and fight for visions of democratic life. He shows how dominant, historical ideals of professionalized press freedom often mistook journalistic freedom from constraints for the public's freedom to encounter the rich mix of people and ideas that self-governance requires. Ananny's notion of press freedom ensures not only an individual right to speak, but also a public right to hear. Seeing press freedom as essential for democratic self-governance, Ananny explores what publics need, what kind of free press they should demand, and how today's press freedom emerges from intertwined collections of humans and machines. If someone says, “The public needs a free press,” Ananny urges us to ask in response, “What kind of public, what kind of freedom, and what kind of press?” Answering these questions shows what robust, self-governing publics need to demand of technologists and journalists alike.




Media Freedom as a Fundamental Right


Book Description

Domestic constitutions and courts applying international human rights conventions acknowledge the significance of the mass media for a democratic society, not only by granting special privileges but also by imposing enhanced duties and responsibilities to journalists and media companies. However, the challenges of media convergence, media ownership concentration and the internet have led to legal uncertainty. Should media privileges be maintained, and, if so, how is 'the media' to be defined? To what extent does media freedom as a legal concept also encompass bloggers who have not undertaken journalistic education? And how can a legal distinction be drawn between investigative journalism on the one hand and reporting on purely private matters on the other? To answer these questions, Jan Oster combines doctrinal and conceptual comparative analysis with descriptive and normative theory, and argues in favour of a media freedom principle based on the significance of the media for public discourse.




Human Rights and a Changing Media Landscape


Book Description

The media play a crucial role in the protection of human rights. They expose human rights violations and offer an arena for different voices to be heard in public discourse. Free, independent and pluralistic media are a core element of any democracy. However, the power of the media can also be misused to the extent that the very functioning of democracy is threatened. Some media outlets have been turned into propaganda megaphones for those in power. Others have been used to incite xenophobic hatred and violence against minorities and other vulnerable groups. Now the phenomenon of social media presents us with a range of fresh challenges. Blogs, video and social networking sites have become a key forum for political debate and organisation - so much so that they have provoked counter-responses from some repressive states. While there is a need to ensure better protection of personal integrity in social media, the right to freedom of expression must not be undermined. The purpose of this publication is to contribute to a more thorough discussion on media developments and their impact on human rights in a constantly changing media landscape. Eight experts were invited to contribute their personal assessments of trends and problems. They have not shied away from addressing controversial issues or providing far-reaching suggestions. Together their texts indicate that there is a need for stronger protection of media freedom and freedom of expression in Europe today. These are clearly topics of paramount importance which demand serious public debate.




The Right to be Forgotten


Book Description

The human race now creates, distributes and stores more information than at any other time in history. Frictionless and cheap digital networks circulate information in ways which either authors or subjects are unable to trace or control. Servers store data which can be found on the world wide web years after it has ceased to be accurate or relevant to its original use. These developments have given rise to a movement promoting a 'right to be forgotten': an argument that freedom of expression should be balanced by a right to erase information which affects an individual, under certain conditions. Rights to privacy therefore need extending and strengthening in the digital era. This strand of thinking influenced a significant judgement delivered by the European Court of Justice in May 2014. As a result, the dominant internet search engine in Europe, Google, has been required to remove links to hundreds of thousands of pieces of information on application from individuals who considered their interests harmed. We know very little of how these delinking choices are made.This book looks at the implications of this controversial decision for free expression, journalism and information in the digital public sphere. Two rights-free speech and privacy-collide in a new way in age of information saturation. Is the judgement a threat to freedom of information and the accuracy of the historical record or the first step in establishing essential new rights in the digital era.




Protecting the right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights


Book Description

European Convention on Human Rights – Article 10 – Freedom of expression 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. 2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary. In the context of an effective democracy and respect for human rights mentioned in the Preamble to the European Convention on Human Rights, freedom of expression is not only important in its own right, but it also plays a central part in the protection of other rights under the Convention. Without a broad guarantee of the right to freedom of expression protected by independent and impartial courts, there is no free country, there is no democracy. This general proposition is undeniable. This handbook is a practical tool for legal professionals from Council of Europe member states who wish to strengthen their skills in applying the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in their daily work.




Media Freedom Under the Human Rights Act


Book Description

"Media Freedom under the Human Rights Act provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the impact of Article 10 ECHR, as received through the Human Rights Act 1998, on the substantive law governing freedom of expression in the media."--BOOK JACKET.




The Poverty of Privacy Rights


Book Description

The Poverty of Privacy Rights makes a simple, controversial argument: Poor mothers in America have been deprived of the right to privacy. The U.S. Constitution is supposed to bestow rights equally. Yet the poor are subject to invasions of privacy that can be perceived as gross demonstrations of governmental power without limits. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutionality of privacy invasions on the poor, and legal scholars typically understand marginalized populations to have "weak versions" of the privacy rights everyone else enjoys. Khiara M. Bridges investigates poor mothers' experiences with the state—both when they receive public assistance and when they do not. Presenting a holistic view of just how the state intervenes in all facets of poor mothers' privacy, Bridges shows how the Constitution has not been interpreted to bestow these women with family, informational, and reproductive privacy rights. Bridges seeks to turn popular thinking on its head: Poor mothers' lack of privacy is not a function of their reliance on government assistance—rather it is a function of their not bearing any privacy rights in the first place. Until we disrupt the cultural narratives that equate poverty with immorality, poor mothers will continue to be denied this right.