Press Freedom

This paper tests the proposition that a free press may be a powerful control on corruption. We find evidence of a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross-section of countries. This result is robust to specification and sample and the relationship is not sensitive to the choice of a particular measure of corruption or of press freedom. Furthermore we present evidence which suggests that the direction of causation runs from higher press freedom to lower corruption. 

This paper employs a theoretical framework that combines political economy and cultural studies to uncover the forces driving the development of press freedom in early modern England, the United States and France from the launch in 1640 of the English Short Parliament, which temporarily abolished censorship, to the French Revolution in 1789. The factors it found to be determinant were a transnational print technology, the public sphere, social movements and egalitarianism, not liberalism, the liberal ideologues and the nation-state highlighted in the dominant press-freedom theory. Going beyond the rights of commercial news media owners, which is a focus of the traditional press-freedom literature, it examines
other manifestations of press freedom, including the use and ownership of the means of publication by formerly excluded groups (including women and tradesmen), publication in vernacular languages, new styles of expression (including ironic treatment of religious and political authorities), and a successful challenge to private monopolistic control over knowledge production, especially printing. This study offers a new theory of press freedom, undergirded by the claim that the production of rights occurs in the realm of social relations, which have cultural, economic and political dimensions.

Openness is a cherished value, if problematical practice, in the governance of public-sector institutions in the United States. Although the nation enjoys a long tradition of espoused commitment to the principle of “open government,” legal guarantees of citizens’ right to information about their government are a relatively modern creation. In the American states, these guarantees prominently take the form of open-meeting and records laws. Often known as sunshine laws, these provisions became widely institutionalized in state statute during the 1960s–70s, when, amidst the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and other widely publicized episodes of corruption at the state level, public con.dence in governmental institutions and leaders plummeted. Although these laws vary in form from one state to the next, they share a similar purpose—to make public bodies more transparent and accountable by providing citizens with reliable access to and knowledge about the conditions and deliberations of those bodies.

Freedom of information Freedom of information law Press freedom Cross-national study This empirical study examines the effect of the Freedom of Information legislation on press freedom by analyzing cross-sectional data at the national level of aggregate indicators across 191 countries in 2010. The prediction by two-stage least square regression found that the impact of the legislation on press freedom is determined by control of corruption, the type of political regime (democratic or authoritarian regime), and the level of national economy. For recent adopters of the legislation, it could be no more than a legislative luxury. As the legislative effect on press freedom is mostly limited to less corrupt, advanced industrial democracies, the workings of the legislation require political and economic prerequisites.

Melanesia, and the microstates of the Pacific generally, face the growing influence of authoritarian and secretive values in the region—projected by both China and Indonesia and with behind-the-scenes manipulation. There is also a growing tendency for Pacific governments to use unconstitutional, bureaucratic or legal tools to silence media and questioning journalists. Frequent threats of closing Facebook and other social media platforms and curbs on online freedom of information are another issue. While Pacific news media face these challenges, their support networks are being shaken by the decline of Australia as a so-called ‘liberal democracy’ and through the undermining of its traditional region-wide public interest media values with the axing of Radio Australia and Australia Network television. Reporting climate change is the Pacific’s most critical challenge while Australian intransigence over the issue is subverting the region’s media. This article engages with and examines these challenges and also concludes that the case of West Papua is a vitally important self-determination issue that left unresolved threatens the security of the region.

Una reseña retrospectiva, del dossier “Democracia, prensa y poder en México: Un debate sobre Newsrooms in Conflict, de Sallie Hughes”, coord. Grisel Salazar. El libro fue publicado en español con el título "Redacciones en conflicto: El periodismo y la democratización en México" (2009).

This study investigates factors that dampens the Indonesian journalists’ freedom and safety in the PostSoeharto’s New Order. To address this research objective, relevant journal articles have been scrutinized. And the in-depth interview data have been derived from the interviews of a former member of the
Indonesian Press Council and four journalists who served four prominent Indonesian mainstream media
including TEMPO, the Jakarta Post, Metro TV and CNN Indonesia. These data have been analysed
using the qualitative and thematic analysis.

The first freedom of information law was enacted in Sweden back in 1766 as the “Freedom of the Press and the Right of Access to Public Records Act”. It sets an example even today. However, the “triumph” of the freedom of information did not take place until much later. Many western legal systems arose from the American Freedom of Information Act, which was signed into law by President L.B. Johnson in 1966. This Act obliges all administrative authorities to provide information to citizens and imposes any necessary limitations. In an exemplary manner, it standardizes the objective of administrative control to protect citizens from government interference with their fundamental rights. Over 100 countries around the world have meanwhile implemented some form of freedom of information legislation. The importance of the right of access to information as an aspect of transparency and a condition for the rule of law and democracy is now also becoming apparent in international treaties at a regional level. This article provides an overview on the crucial elements and the guiding legal principles of transparency legislation, also by tracing back the lines of development of national and international case-law.

Publicity is central to terrorism, but demonstrating a link between press freedom and the targeting of attacks is challenging. There are several reasons for this: 1) studies do not distinguish between press freedom and press attention; 2) perpetrators use press freedom to weed out unacceptable targets rather than to determine which targets to attack; 3) only foreign, not domestic, perpetrators depend on press attention; and 4) foreign terrorists satisfy their desire for press attention by attacking powerful states. Our models confirm this argument about press freedom and national power even after controlling for executive constraints, polity, and foreign policy activity.

Wilbur Schramm’s “Soviet” communist model and J. Herbert Altschull’s “Marxist” approach have been widely used as general theoretical frameworks to examine press systems in the Marxist world in general and China in particular. Though a growing literature suggested significant changes in Chinese journalism in the past 2 decades, very few studies have sent a direct challenge to the 2 models’ theoretical wisdom through the Chinese case. This article finds neither of the 2 models is sufficient in conceptualizing the Chinese case because of Chinese news media’s transitional nature and the 2 models’ inner theoretical flaws as normative press theories. Furthermore, realizing the growing conflict between normative media theories and accelerated post-Cold War global media transformation, the author suggests using
a transitional media approach to revisit the traditional normative media approach and calls for a more systematic study of the transitional phenomenon of global media systems.

This study explores the ways in which global press freedom watchdogs have discursively constructed the issue of press freedom during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on a multimodal discourse analysis, the study examines web stories and Tweets posted by the International Press Institute (IPI), the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), and Reporters sans Frontières (RSF), with the purpose of answering three primary questions: (1) Who or what do the CPJ, the IPI, and RSF represent as the greatest threat to press freedom in relation to Covid-19? (2) What are the differences between these groups’ representations of press freedom in their own regions of the world and their representations of press freedom in “Other” places? (3) What digital strategies do the IPI, CPJ, and RSF use in coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic? The article ultimately seeks to understand the ways in which each of these influential press freedom groups help to popularize particular understandings of press freedom in the 21st century.

Our research on the social movement opposing proposed piracy legislation reveals novel societal opportunities and challenges caused by digitization. We summarize literature on the Katz and Lazarsfeld Two-Step Model of Communication and propose a new model of mass communication for the digital age. We develop a digital discourse bias framework comprised of three structural constraints (on authorship, citation, and influence) and three content restrictions (on frames, signatures, and emotion). Our findings paradoxically reveal social media affords emancipation with regard to structural constraints, but is hegemonic with regard to an important content restriction (i.e., frames). Lean social media mitigated structural advantages and exacerbated content problems. These findings suggest that, as with traditional media, some inevitable evils accompany the societal benefits of social media and that mass media is having a detrimental effect on public discourse. Compared to traditional mass media, digital mass media are in some ways emancipatory (i.e., permitting widespread participation in public discourse and surfacing of diverse perspectives) and in other ways hegemonic (i.e., contributing to ideological control by a few).

This essay examines James Fenimore Cooper’s two key non-fiction texts, Notions of the Americans (1828) and The American Democrat (1838), for their appraisal of the process of opinion-formation in democracies. Cooper is concerned with the lack of mental independence and conformism that characterizes American democracy. In particular, he worries that public-spirited individuals will avoid participating in the public sphere for fear of defamation by irresponsible newspaper editors, and that public discourse may instead be captured  by partisans, levelers, and speculating money-grubbers. His response is to appropriate for the burgeoning democracy the concept of “gentleman,” a term which he now applies to the public-spirited democrat whose persuasive, non-demagogic rhetoric defends equal rights to life, liberty, and property. The true American democrat is the moderate individual, neither sheepish nor presumptuous, who speaks and acts in defense of equal freedom

This eight-nation comparative study adopts a multi-modal analytical approach in investigating education driven stratification in political participation and the simultaneous roles of various media (print newspaper, television, radio, and social media) and press freedom in influencing this inequality. The findings suggest that informational use of social media, print newspaper, and radio increases the likelihood of participation, but consuming television news inhibits participation. Furthermore, social media use, like radio and television use, exacerbates education-generated inequality. Press freedom as a socio-political factor reinforces the role of the television, print newspaper, and social media in participation inequality. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

Political philosophical work on whistleblowing has thus far neglected the role of journalists. A curious oversight, given that the whistleblower's objective-informing the public about government wrongdoing-can typically not be realized without the media. The present article, therefore, aims to start remedying this neglect by exploring some of the most pressing questions. Accordingly, the paper will be structured as follows: Section 1 will explain why the authorities have treated whistleblowers far more harshly than the journalists who publish their disclosures. Still, the freedom of expression of media workers is (and ought to be) less extensive than that of ordinary individuals. Section 2 will explain why by arguing that the freedom of expression of the press, contrary to that of individuals, is not an unconditional good; instead, it is good merely instrumentally. Section 3 considers and refutes an argument for a more expansive press freedom based on the marketplace of ideas model and, in doing so, also discusses some important differences between the ethics of the traditional and the new online media. Often journalists, like whistleblowers, will justify their publications based on leaked classified documents by appealing to the public interest. Yet, this is problematic for two reasons: (1) the public interest is never clarified; and (2) this argument overlooks the fact that the public interest can also be a reason for not publishing about leaked classified documents, even if the leaks are verified (in the interest of national security, for example). Accordingly, Section 5 sets out to clarify the public interest. Section 4 then discusses two case studies-one concerning unverified leaks, and one concerning verified leaks-in order to demonstrate how we might employ the concept of the public interest in order to determine the permissibility of publishing about leaked classified information in practice.

Drawing on the examples of Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), this chapter considers the factors influencing press freedom in post-conflict societies. Based on Minabere Ibelema, Larry Powell, and William Self’s assumption that ‘both forces of control and freedom are in a constant state of  flux’, we argue that very different dynamics affect the freedom of the press in those countries, albeit in times of political unrest, which include contested elections, mass protests, or legitimation crisis. However, political factors, especially restricting press freedom, seem to prevail over other constraints.

To what extent is populist rule associated with a decline in press freedom and freedom of expression? Populist rule refers to government headed by charismatic leaders who seek to gain and retain power by mobilizing mass constituencies that are typically free of other political attachments. Populism in this sense matters for two reasons: 1.) controlling the media is a core objective of populists compared to other types of political leaders, who can rely on other organizational links to supporters; 2.) the interests of populist parties are virtually equivalent to the interests of party leaders, which means that populist leaders face different time horizons and constraints on their behavior than the leaders of more deeply institutionalized parties. Using cross-national data on 88 countries from 1980-2014, this paper tests whether rule by populist rule is associated with the erosion of press freedom and freedom of expression relative to other types of government and whether any effect is conditional on the ideology of the populist government in question. It finds that populist rule is associated with a decline in most measures of media freedom relative to programmatic party rule. However, this effect is lessened for right-leaning populist governments.

This article provides an overview of how journalists and the media in the post-Soviet countries are regulated by law, and of how in the sociopolitical structure of a law-based state their work can be optimized to become a foundation for public accord and stability. The author sees the legal conditions for a free press in the development of mechanisms of journalists' access to information, in the creation of public broadcasting, in the access of political opposition to the public (or state) media, in the denationalization of mass media outlets, etc. Limitations under the pretext of informational sovereignty or the fight against terrorism and political extremism should not undermine ideological and political plurality in the media and society. The article concludes with a comparison of the level of press freedom between all 15 post-Soviet states.

Cross-national research has identified crime, corruption, and human rights abuses as explanations for threats against journalists in democracies and authoritarian
hybrids plagued by antipress violence. In-depth studies additionally suggest gender or occupational characteristics such as risky newsbeats increase the likelihood of being
threatened. We overcome data limitations in many of these studies by analyzing work related threats reported by journalists in Mexico, a territorially uneven democracy.
Findings confirm that contexts of criminal insecurity are the strongest predictor of threats but only for journalists who are frequently harassed. For the infrequently threatened, democratic normative commitments are a stronger predictor. Subnational government corruption is another important predictor of threat but operates counter to expectations. We believe this is because clientelism sufficiently controls journalists without the need for threat. Neither occupational traits nor gender were individually
important predictors. Findings suggest future research should compare threat and harassment across lower and higher risk contexts, and measure public insecurity
and clientelism at the local level where journalists actually work. Measurement improvements might better reveal the gender dynamics of threat. More broadly, comparative research and policy-making in democracies and authoritarian hybrids should focus on how local authoritarians limit journalists’ democratic normative aspirations.

This study investigates the role of the Internet in protest participation in the Arab world. More specifically, we aim to address three important questions: (1) Does Internet news use increase the chances of protest participation? (2) Does Internet news use amplify or reduce participation gaps that exist among individuals at various socioeconomic strata? (3) How does a country's press freedom act as a contextual factor to shape the role of the Internet in affecting protest participation gaps? The results based on an analysis of the third wave of Arab Democracy Barometer survey suggest that Internet news use for political purposes increases the likelihood of protest participation in the Arab world while it also deepens socioeconomic stratification in participation. Furthermore, national press freedom shapes the intervening role of the Internet. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for political inequality literature and the practical consequences for the Arab world.

El objetivo de este trabajo es comprender y estudiar la evolución en España del papel de la publicidad institucional en las distintas administraciones del Estado. Se analizan los procesos de rendición de cuentas de la misma en un nuevo escenario de competencia y reciente legislación auto-nómica donde además de nuevos medios digitales, emergen buscadores como Google, plataformas como YouTube y redes sociales como Facebook o Twitter. En la actualidad una legislación en torno a los contenidos patrocinados-incluidos patrocinios y publirreportajes-, la transparencia de los anunciantes y empresas informativas o el papel de los medios sociales están abriendo aún más el debate en este momento.

Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese Communist Party's major provincial organs have established a large number of highly commercialized and urban-reader oriented daily newspapers, which are widely regarded as an `individual' press category called "city newspapers". As an important press phenomenon that reflects some significant recent changes in Chinese print media, the rise of city newspapers has attracted little attention in western communication scholarship so far. After a general description of the historical development of city newspapers, this article further examines their characteristics and impact on the Chinese press.

As China is seen to rise as a major power in the global economy and politics, there has been growing academic interest in the country’s changing media landscape. It is, however, never an easy task to read media systems in a post-Communist market authoritarian society like China. Students of Chinese media studies are often excited by the rapid growth and commercialization of the media industry, on the one hand, and puzzled and frustrated by its lack of press freedom and professionalism, on the other hand. This special issue of The International Communication Gazette wishes to contribute to the current academic debate on the Chinese media by identifying and focusing on some of the most recent changes in this area. Before I introduce the four articles collected in this special issue in some detail, it is useful to undertake a critical analysis of the main theoretical frameworks that have been used to understand the Chinese media ‘puzzle’ in recent research literature, and explore the
possibility of developing new ones.

On 13 July 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron set up an official inquiry committee headed by Lord Justice Brian Leveson to study the culture, practice and ethics of the press.  Presently, British government is considering the best ways as to how to implement the Leveson recommendations. This timely article analyses the Leveson Report, arguing that that the existing situation in Britain is far from satisfactory; that the press should advance more elaborate mechanisms of education, raising awareness of ethical concerns and self-control, and that while these mechanisms are indeed necessary, they are not sufficient. This essay agrees with Leveson that there is a need of empowering the new regulatory body with legal authority, thus equipping it with substantive ability to sanction. Building on the author's experience as a public representative on the Israel Press Council, the article ends with concrete recommendations as to how to improve the work of the press and to ensure that it will adhere to basic ethical and professional standards. It suggests a new and comprehensive Code of Practice, and instituting a new powerful body called The Public and Press Council.

As American newspapers came under various forms of financial strain in the 1940s, arguably the most significant threat facing the industry during this period was an onslaught of media criticism in conjunction with a series of attempted state interventions. This paper fleshes out recurring themes of 1940s media criticism and shows how they coincided with moves toward regulating the press, which had begun in the late 1930s. Using historical methods, including close readings of newspaper, trade press, and activist literature and other materials that shed light on debates around press reform, this critical revisionist history brings into focus a formative period in the American press system's development. The history that emerges from this archival evidence does not simply bring previously under-researched areas into focus; it also questions the presumed natural laissez-faire arrangement between the American government and the press*an assumption that largely remains intact to this day.

International news both reflects and affects economic changes. Yet, the impact of press freedom on this relationship was not systematically studied. The present paper analyzed the trends of country mentions in international economic news and their corresponding GDP trends over a period of six years.

Findings identified the different functions of economic news. Controlled press countries were mentioned more frequently in economic news around the world about one month before an increase and after a decrease in their GDP. This time lag reflected the use of economic news as a mean of propaganda to promote the country and strengthen its economy. Free press countries, on the other hand, were mentioned more frequently in economic news a few months before a decrease and after an increase in their GDP. In this case, economic news primarily functioned as a warning system for economic deviance.

The overarching goal of this article is to present a methodology for attributing publications with false and misleading imprints to their unnamed printers. The answer to this problem—how to link publications featuring inaccurate imprints back to those who actually printed them—lies in the use of ornament catalogues. In short, knowing a printer’s ornament stock over a period of time would allow us to attribute works featuring false and misleading imprints from the same period to his or her printing house. Doing so would also allow us to pinpoint sometimes provisionally but often definitively one actor or unit in the life cycle of a publication—in this instance, the printing house from which it originated. In this article I focus specifically on the range of plausible-sounding but entirely made-up printers’ and booksellers’ names regularly found on false imprints throughout the eighteenth century. In particular, I hone in on the wholly fictional “A. Moore,” Using extant ornament catalogues, I have managed to attribute dozens of these A. Moore-imprinted publications to their respective printers. In addition, I present a theory of ornament usage that emerged as I assembled my corpus of A. Moore-imprinted works. The most intriguing case remains the recurring use of a headpiece and factotum combination in A. Moore-imprinted publications from the 1720s and 1730s that were in fact printed by the printer-bookseller Thomas Read. The regularity with which these two ornaments were used in tandem in A. Moore-imprinted publications, however, also suggests something much more interesting. In short, it seems Read (and perhaps others individually) reserved a small collection of ornaments for legally perilous publications. Read did so, theoretically, because he realized that ornaments might be a way for the legal authorities to do the very thing that I propose here as an investigative bibliographical methodology: to trace illicitly published works with false and misleading imprints back to the printers who actually produced them. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 110.2 (June 2016): 181-214.

Se presenta un análisis temático de tres debates parlamentarios claves para el tema de la libertad de expresión en el ámbito mediático en Chile desde la vuelta a la democracia: la discusión en torno a la Ley de Prensa 1993–2001, el Informe de la Comisión Especial sobre las Libertades de Pensamiento y Expresión 2007–2010 y el debate de la Ley de Televisión Digital 2008–2014. En todos ellos, la batalla principal se ha librado por el signi cado mismo de la libertad de expresión, por su contenido meramente negativo —como la libertad de “injerencia” estatal— o el positivo que supone un Estado activo. Los ganadores de los debates argumentaron en contra de la regulación viéndola como una intromisión estatal limitante para el mercado, y reduciendo así la noción de la libertad de expresión a la libertad de empresa.

This article presents a thematic analysis of three parliamentary debates that are key to the topic of freedom of expression in the Chilean media since the return of democracy: the debate on the Press Law, 1993–2001; the Report of the Special Commission on Freedom of Thought and Freedom of Expression, 2007–2010; and the debate on the Digital Television Law, 2008–2014. In all three cases, the debates turned fundamentally on the central issue of the very meaning of the concept of freedom of expression: whether it should be understood in a merely negative sense—as freedom from state “interference”—or as a positive right to expression (presupposing an active state). These debates were all won by those who argued against regulation, viewing it as state intrusion against the market and thus reducing the notion of free expression to that of free enterprise.

Governance measurement is a relatively new source of entertainment for economists. The World Bank Institute paved the way in the late 90`s with the now famous suite "Governance Matters", I, II, III, IV… The little imagination of KKZ 1 , regarding the choice of their publications title, hides the most popular aggregated governance indicators.

Having inspired by "The Mortality Muzzle: The effect of death thoughts on attitudes toward national security and a watchdog press" article by Cuillier et al. (2010), the current study aims to examine the effect of mortality salience and political tendencies on attitudes of university students in Turkey towards free press and free speech. Original study's aim was to understand how Terror Management Theory's predictions effect people's attitudes towards a watchdog press. This study, aims to conduct a similar research in Turkey, understand how the stated factors work in Turkish culture, and see how results differ. Study was conducted in with a total of 110 university students (%61 female, %37 male, %2 unstated) taking various undergraduate and MA courses from communication faculty of a foundation university in Istanbul Turkey. Besides Terror Management Theory, results are discussed according to Turkey's specific conditions at the time data was collected, and participants' political tendencies. In addition, possible reasons for the differences in results are specified.

This study examines the changes and challenges of China’s newspaper industry by focusing on the popular press sector that has dominated the daily newspaper market since the early 2000s. Specifically, the study investigates three key issues: (1) the dramatic expansion of the popular press sector at the expense of the Party organ sector in the early and mid-2000s, (2) the stagnation of the popular press sector since then despite its efforts to experiment with a so-called mainstream press in the second half of the decade and (3) this study’s call for a ‘broadloid’ press approach in response to this stagnation.

The study investigates the casual relationship between press freedom and human development in Bangladesh by using data from the Reporters Without Borders and United Nations Development Programme over the period 2002-2014. The modified causality test "Toda-Yamamoto" has been applied to analyze the data. Though, it is widely believed that press freedom and development go hand in hand, the results suggest that there is no evidence of causal relationship either from freedom of the press and human development in Bangladesh. This implies that in the long-run, press freedom does not cause human development and vice versa. This result is obvious for the country as it is still lag behind in achieving improvements to this two-press freedom and human development. Thus, the causal relationship between the two is not established in Bangladesh. This study suggests for shaping appropriate policies to advance press freedom in the country and thereby human development should be redefined considering improvements in press freedom.

In this article we show that perceptions of corruption and the experience of bribery are related theoretically and empirically at the individual level, although the magnitude of this association relies on two context variables, country-level corruption and press freedom. For that purpose, we first offer a critical review of the literature studying perceptions of corruption. Then we propose a sociological approach to understand how people form "mental images" of corruption beyond (as well as based on) their personal experience of bribery. We test its main implications using a cross-national approach based on ISSP's 2016 Role of Government survey module, as well as the national-level predictors suggested by our theoretical framework and the specialized literature. Using multilevel models, we show that the generalized perception of corruption is associated with the personal experience of bribery and that this relation is stronger in countries where corruption is relatively absent and press freedom is high, i.e., developed countries. So, context is important in order to understand why perceptions of corruption and the experience of bribery sometimes are associated and other times are not. Finally, we argue that our findings could apply to a wide range of opinions lying far beyond the personal experience.

On 19 October 1995, the Governor-General of Papua New Guinea issued the terms of reference for a Constitutional Review Committee's (CRC) Subcommittee on Media Accountability: to examine 'whether changes need to be made to ensure that, while freedom of the press is maintained, owners, editors and journalists of all elements of the media are accountable and that persons aggrieved by media abuses have reasonable redress'. The CRC held a public seminar in January 1996 to explore the issues and the Media Council of Papua New Guinea held a 'freedom at the crossroads' seminar the following month. Public responses were overwhelmingly in favour of the traditional 'free' press in Papua New Guinea, as guaranteed under Section 46 of the Constitution. The report of the Subcommittee on Media Accountability to Parliament in June 1996 essentially came to the same conclusion. However, the CRC introduced three draft media laws in November which introduced a controversial system involving a Media Commission, registration of journalists, licensing of media organisations and serious penalties for transgressors. The proposed legislation was widely condemned and was eventually shelved in February 1997. A general view is that the media debate was manipulated by a small group of politicians out of self-interest. This paper examines the developments in the context of the erosion of the news media and free expression in the South Pacific generally.

Many scholars acknowledge the substantive changes in Chinese media in the post-Mao period, but regret that these have not resulted in western-style press freedoms. Significant among these changes has been the emergence and rapid development of what is termed the semi-independent media that now constitute a prominent feature of China's ''socialist'' media industries. Focusing on a case study of the Chengdu Business News, this article argues that the rise of these semi-independent media, which reflects the relaxation of media regulation post-Mao, has generated significant structural and operational changes in Chinese newspapers.

This article documents self-censorship practices in three state-owned media institutions in Ethiopia: Ethiopian Television, the Ethiopian News Agency and the Ethiopian Herald. The data from in-depth interviews with 34 reporters and editors reveals that self-censorship is an everyday activity in the newsrooms, but is particularly prevalent during times of tension and in political coverage. The article discusses how self-censorship routines are internalised and reinforced among new candidates for reporter jobs. It is argued that the journalists take on certain “ethical rationalisations” (or pseudo ethical reasoning, if one prefers) to justify the practice. Four principal rationalisations are identified: liberties normally accorded to editing practice; transferring ethical responsibility from the individual journalist to the institution; confidence that the audience will counter-read the news; and self-censorship as a support for the supposed benefits of development journalism.