The fabled fourth estate: Media freedom, democracy and human rights

For more than a century philosophers, politicians, human rights advocates and ordinary people have called for media freedom. Indeed, spreading media freedom is widely seen as a key to promoting development, democracy and human rights. The idea is that independent media will keep government in line and make life better for citizens. These are grand expectations. Many journalists have risked their lives and some have died striving to fulfill them. Yet, really, little is known as to whether free media are up to the task. That then is the focus of this study: under what conditions are the media able to improve human rights? I present a conditional theory of the effect of media freedom on protest and government respect for human rights. Specifically, I hypothesize that the effect of media freedom varies depending on the presence or absence of democratic characteristics because these determine the vulnerability of government to public opinion. Much of what we know about the effect of free media comes from studies of how they function in democracies. Certainly, leaders who are constrained by political competition, political participation and whose decision making power is limited are more likely to react benevolently to media criticism. I argue that leaders who are not restrained by these democratic characteristics are likely to respond quite differently. Similarly, citizens who live in democracies have many institutional outlets with which to push for government reform; those who live in autocracies do not. Therefore, I propose that critical news coverage is likely to promote protest in non-democracies and that leaders in these settings are likely to use repression to stifle dissent. I use statistical analyses and case studies to test my hypotheses that the effect of media freedom on protest and human rights depends on democracy. The results suggest that in absence of democratic institutions, media freedom is associated with increased general strikes and increased repression of physical integrity rights and women's social, political and economic rights.