(WPFC/IFEX) – The following is a 6 May 2001 WPFC press release: WINDHOEK, Namibia – The World Press Freedom Committee today announced publication of a landmark history of press freedom, written by veteran media scholar Leonard R. Sussman, as part of a series of global World Press Freedom Day events here in southern Africa. The […]
(WPFC/IFEX) – The following is a 6 May 2001 WPFC press release:
WINDHOEK, Namibia – The World Press Freedom Committee today announced publication of a landmark history of press freedom, written by veteran media scholar Leonard R. Sussman, as part of a series of global World Press Freedom Day events here in southern Africa.
The book, Press Freedom in Our Genes: A Human Need, traces the struggle for freedom of expression and of the press from the earliest communication efforts by cave artists to today’s cyber-spacial news transmissions.
Sussman, who was for 21 years executive director of the New York-based human rights organization Freedom House, maintains that the drive to seek and convey information is a fundamental human instinct, whose progress through history varies only with the nature and sophistication of the technology available with which to express it.
“Through all unrecorded and recorded history,” he writes, “humans have been striving for freedom. When the technology became accessible – smoke signals, drums, papyrus, skins, stone, script, movable type, printing presses, telegraph, radio, television, satellites, the Internet and always word of mouth – with each new format humans struggled to break the chains of silence and of censorship.”
Publication of the 228-page book coincides with the 25th anniversary of the World Press Freedom Committee, a coordinating group for 44 free press organizations on six continents. Based in Reston, Va., the WPFC works to monitor the deliberations of intergovernmental institutions as they relate to media freedom, to identify threats to freedom of the press and to mobilize united action against news restrictions.
“We have sponsored Leonard Sussman’s analysis of the history of press freedom in an effort to help citizens everywhere – with or without a fully free press – to understand how this basic human right was fought for against colonial authority and even constitutional democratic government,” said WPFC Chairman James H. Ottaway, senior vice president of Dow Jones & Company.
Ottaway cautioned that although freedom of expression and of the press are acknowledged as universal and fundamental human rights, “they are not given to any society automatically, even when provided by constitutions…The human need for freedom of speech and freedom of the press must be fought for in every society and in every generation. We have a long way to go to make these freedoms a reality in every country of the world. The contest between freedom of expression and censorship will never end.”
Sussman, senior scholar in international communications at Freedom House, has coordinated an annual assessment of global press freedom for the past 24 years. The just-released 2001 Report indicates that only about 21% of the world’s people live in countries with a fully free press. The remaining percentage live in countries with only partial press freedom or with a press ranked “not free.”
“The content and quality of today’s information, and the freedom with which it is prepared and delivered, is determined both by human impulses to seek and impart news, and by censorious acts to avert or divert news reporting,” Sussman says in an introduction to the book. “That is the history of the freedom of the press. That history – all of it – is in our genes. We ignore it at our peril.”
