Protecting Press and Public

Abstract

The assertion of the right to speak, to publish, to know and to make known is one of the great historic claims to liberty. It is made insistently on behalf of the Press and it involves a claim of right to gather as well as to publish what has been gathered and this in turn raises questions, much debated in our times, of the protection of sources of information. A modern American judge has said that the claim to freedom of the Press gives expression to the proposition that without it there can be no free society; freedom of the Press is not an end in itself, but a means to the end of a free society. In one of the great modern cases in which the claim of freedom to publish was considered in the context of the interests of protecting a fair trial, the Thalidomide case, Lord Simon of Glaisdale said that:

the first public interest is that of freedom of discussion in a democratic society. People cannot adequately influence the decisions which affect their lives unless they can be adequately informed on the facts and arguments relevant to the decisions. Much of such fact finding and argumentation necessarily has to be conducted vicariously, the public Press being a principal instrument. This is the justification for investigative and campaign journalism. (House of Lords Judgment, July 1973.)