Freedom of expression

40 A further pursuit of the debates about ‘public service’ would go beyond the scope of this dissertation.

However I will return to the issue of ‘public service’ briefly in the discussion of freedom of expression.

Most ‘western’ democratic countries operate with a formal notion of freedom of speech⁴¹ but not a material freedom of speech, which would mean that no laws could prohibit for, for instance, hate speech or discrimination. Formal freedom of speech was introduced after the French Revolution to secure for the people access to the uncensored truth and to guarantee that the state could not withhold information in oppression of its people. Freedom of speech was, then, a tool to counteract potential state control. It was a freedom from state-controlled information. In the example of Denmark, theories of media responsibility have led to organisational policies among local newspapers describing good journalistic conduct and the two national TV stations in Denmark, DR and TV2, have, respectively, fully and partly public service obligations and are respectively fully and partly financially compensated by the state.

These sorts of regulations underline the rights of minorities in the societies to communicate and secure a positive definition of freedom of expression as a freedom to communicate rather than a freedom from interference from the state (Drotner, Bruhn Jensen, Poulsen and Schrøder 2002: 312-13). Moreover, ‘[a]n important function of the media, and of journalists in particular, has been and remains the exposure of corruption in all its manifold forms and it is one that is crucial to the fair and effective working of democracy’ (Anderson and Ward 2007: 19). Freedom of speech, then, serves both to allow the public a voice to speak up against the powers that be (that is the right to be heard (Silverstone 2007)) and the right to be informed.

Journalists are the keepers of this tool of communication and are left with the power to determine what the ‘public’ wants and needs and how it wants it presented (Berry 2005). As defenders of freedom of expression they are granted extensive rights and freedoms to formulate this defence as ‘accurately’ as possible. The concept of objectivity – ethically as well as epistemologically – is therefore closely related to freedom of expression in that the journalistic definition of ‘impartial’ and ‘fair’

41 In the case of Denmark, censorship was reinstated during the Napoleonic Wars in 1810 after some hundred years of partial and full freedom of expression. Denmark’s long on-and-off history of censorship was determined by the reformed Lutheran Church and the universities from 1537 to 1660 when autocracy was instated. Censorship was then enforced mainly by the Deans of the universities and otherwise by royal appointed authorities, until Johan Friedrich Struense, doctor to the king and private secretary of the queen, had censorship written out of the national laws in 1770. But then the Napoleonic Wars took place. It was not until 1848, however, when the nation wrote its first national constitution, that freedom of expression was implemented for good. The paragraph in the Danish Constitution which secures freedom of expression ends with the promise that censorship can never be re-instituted.

reporting holds within it the definition of who ‘the public’ is, wants and thinks is

‘truthful’ and ‘fair’.

Though international journalistic associations have formulated proclamations to serve the truth (Drotner et al. 2002, Berry 2005, Muhlmann 2008), this truth has increasingly been seen as serving a ‘common public’. This gives journalism its unifying function (Muhlmann 2008) but it also problematises the issues, because when the public is seen as being one entity to which the truth is served, it is assumed that the truth is the same for everybody – objectively – and not a subjective construction.

[J]ournalism addresses a public perceived as a unified entity, or at least as an entity that is capable of being unified, and that has a right to obtain what is its due, that is, a description which is not exclusively singular, but applies the criteria of common sense and so presents a common reality. (Muhlmann 2008:

9).

The public is thus represented as one entity with rights. That is, it is a conscious rational idea of citizenship. The ‘criteria of common sense’ that Muhlmann (2008) is introducing in her political history of journalism, however, is not solely political. I argue that it is simultaneously and interdependently political and personal because of the binding and creative function of journalistic cultural memory in the social imaginary, defined in a previous section of this chapter. The truth which journalism is serving is not based on political ideas of citizenship alone, but on ethnically, gendered, religious, national and cultural assumptions of national unity as well. The function of journalism as public memory is not about catastrophes alone but is in equal measures about the ‘soft’ news that affirms ‘our’ identity (Kitch 2008). I will qualify this statement shortly when presenting media research in the Danish context and it will be discussed in detail below.

Within the history of mainstream, unifying journalistic production, decentring journalism (Muhlmann 2008) has a history of its own of resisting the unifying function of journalism. In Muhlmann’s words: ‘Decentring journalists put themselves in a position of “non-belonging” to “us” in order to provoke a conflict which touches on the collective identity; they confront “us” by means of an exteriority-otherness, and in this way undo us’ (Muhlmann 2008: 30). That is, decentring journalism turns the

investigative journalistic gaze on ‘us’ rather than ‘them’ by taking the position of

‘them’. However, readily recognisable is the risk of turning the marginalised other,

‘them’, into a new unified entity – that is reconstructing a centre of perception.

Another identifiable risk is of misrepresenting the other, that the decentring journalist, rather than shifting location to the marginalised, shifts his or her location to a false representation. Here questions of journalistic assumptions of ‘authenticity’ appear.⁴² I have already mentioned the practices of New Journalism and Public Journalism and recent developments in media structures and journalistic practices seem also to challenge the unifying function, but circumventing journalistic practice in the process.

‘Civic journalism’ in which the-man-on-the-street becomes the eye, ‘I’, of the news story through mobile phone cameras, is a more recent example of how the unifying reporting is changing. The London underground bombing in July 2005 and the tsunami catastrophe in the Indian Ocean in December 2004 are examples of how civilians’ recordings of events have an impact on journalistic reporting. The internet provides facilities for a number of minority media outlets such as feminist, queer and other activist and migrant groups (Gill 2007) that connect people in virtual communities. The concept of ‘blogging’ has taken on a life of its own, providing online readers with subjective opinions and more or less qualified analyses of almost everything in the news, in life and in politics. These developments provoke a ‘shift in power from the newsroom to the connected online and digital world. [Journalism]

must become networked’ (Beckett 2008). The developments moreover challenge the concept of epistemological as well as ethical objectivity and the traditional function of formal freedom of speech. The concept of objectivity is challenged through the obvious subject-position of these new de facto journalists and journalistic practices, but because the ideal of objectivity (in the definitions discussed above) is the foundation for freedom of speech the latter is simultaneously questioned. The question is who has the freedom to speak – that is who is being heard – when we can no longer hold that objectivity persists?⁴³

42 An in-depth discussion of the claim of ‘authenticity’ in relation to journalistic practice is beyond the scope of this chapter.

43 In case study 3, I argue that this is the very crux of the case of the Danish ‘cartoon controversy’. It is a case of journalistic institutions becoming political protagonists in their own news stories, when in the second round of the cartoon controversy in Denmark (2008) a unified Danish press reprinted the cartoons as a protest against alleged plans to kill one of the cartoonists. In this case the journalists (the tool of freedom of speech) were both the subject and the object of the story and more than that they were a story that was initiated because of this very tool – freedom of speech. It is then, I think, possible to rephrase the question of the journalists’ speaking positions in the cartoon controversy into a question

As already argued, journalism is deeply implicated in the construction of the social