BrianGarst.com

Although local to Australia, this news illustrates a useful point. First, the story:

PRINT and online news will come under direct federal government oversight for the first time under proposals issued yesterday to create a statutory regulator with the power to prosecute media companies in the courts.

…The proposals, issued yesterday by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, also seek to widen the scope of federal oversight to cover print, online, radio and TV within a single regulator for the first time.

…Bloggers and other online authors would also be captured by a regime applying to any news site that gets more than 15,000 hits a year, a benchmark labelled “seriously dopey” by one site operator.

The head of the review, former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein, rejected industry warnings against setting up a new regulator under federal law with funding from government.

…”There must be some effective means of raising standards of journalism and of making the media publicly accountable,” the report said. “What the media have lost sight of is that they accepted the idea of press regulation by having set up the APC to make a positive contribution to the development of journalistic standards.

Yes, this is an outrageous assault on the universal principle of free speech. Granting government this kind of authority is, simply put, a recipe for tyrannical disaster. But even beyond the specific issue at hand, the statement in the last paragraph above is particularly myopic.

Where does this idea come from that accountability can only come from political processes? Public accountability is provided by free market competition. There is no stronger mechanism for accountability than the ability of citizens to choose which products they do or do not consume. Political processes, which are vulnerable to corruption and favoritism, are hardly more rigorous.

The last sentence is equally fallacious. If you look carefully at the structure of his sentence, you can see the speaker deliberately hiding the nature of his argument. He speaks of “press regulation,” but not of who is regulating. Self-regulation is not the same as government regulation. The APC, or Australian Press Council, is an industry created and funded body. Its mere existence, regardless of its level of efficacy, is in no way a concession that government should be involved, and it certainly doesn’t resolve the problem of giving government power over media. A free media is a necessary but not sufficient condition for restraining the power and abuses of any government. This initiative will make Australian media, and consequently the Australian people, less free. Let’s hope such bad reasoning does not spread to other nations.

free speech