A recent article in The Economist calls attention to the retreat of democracy in the world. In 2017, according to the Democracy Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit, 89 countries registered democratic setbacks, while only 27 registered improvements.
The article describes how authoritarian rulers set out to subvert democracy. One obvious move is to take control of the justice system and this, of course, must be strongly resisted. Another common denominator in any resistance to democratic slippage is the battle to preserve a free press. If a free press is undermined, the battle to preserve democracy itself is on the way to being lost.
That being so, the rule for dealing with the media in a democracy is very simple. Governments in seeking to bring “order” into the media must ensure the nation does not lose the priceless benefit of maintaining access to the widest possible range of information, education and entertainment and access also to views expressed from around the whole compass of opinion. Bringing order out of anarchy is an admirable objective but if order leads to a drastic narrowing of international programming and the stifling of diversified local opinion, that would certainly be an unacceptable alternative.
