Supervision By Public Opinion And Legal Boundaries Of The Protection Of Personality Rights

Media supervision is one of the important functions of news media. In these years, with the acceleration of progress of China's democracy and legalization, the supervision of the meida has been having more and more impact in the political and economic social life. However, lawsuits related to news report have mushroomed as well. This phenomenon reflects, in one aspect, the expanding of democratic environment and the lifting of public legal awareness, while in the other aspect, the incompetence of the legal structure related to media supervision of our country. In our current legal practice, there is no line drawn between what is appropriate media supervision which should be protected by law and what is abuse of it which should be prohibited. This prevents protecting not only the legal rights of citizens and organizations but also the rights of interviewing and reporting of news agency. In addition, the courts are put on more burdens due to this shortness of related laws.Protection of media supervision and of right of personality are products of the modern society as well as the symbol of civilization, both of which are systems basically indispensable to the construction of democratic and legal structure, as well as to the maintenance of social stableness and harmony. However, it should be noticed that there is subtle conflicts between the protections of these two rights. Torts of news reporting is direct to right of personality of citizens, especially right of reputation and right of privacy, so the difference of legal penalty to torts will directly affect the different types of protection of news reporting freedom, public supervision and right of personality of citizens. If the law only protects right of personality and ignores protecting media supervision, this protection must be at the cost of sacrificing appropriate and necessary media supervision, which will result in a society where people cannot say or criticize whatever they want to. People would not expose and criticize various evil and illegal events by means of mass media. These will connive at those behaviours which infringe the right of personality of citizens, and in the meantime, will degrade the right of personality to absolute extreme individualism. On the contrary, if the law sufficiently protect the media supervision while ignore the protection of the right of personality, the right of media supervision is likely to be abused. "Right without restriction definitely leads to corruption." And the right of media supervision is no exception, otherwise it will probably be abused and cause corruption. As Mr. Xu Chunguang has said, media supervision is like a double-bladed sword. It could be conducive to expose evil, advocate justice, criticize the wrong, expand the right, uphold fairness, develop democracy and resolve conflicts if used properly and effectively, helping news media to serve better to the public; otherwise it could have negative effects, upending right and wrong, confusing people's opinions, harming the innocent, all of which will jeopardize the steady progress of the reform and development, and more important, the right and free will of people.The conflict between right of personality and media supervision is "conflict between values", which is a problem faced by every country's legal system. As a person working for news programme in relation to legal structure for many years, at a time when "ruled of law" was publicly proposed on the Sixteenth National People's Congress, how to regard and resolve the conflict between right of personality and media supervision, where to draw the line between them and which one should be given the priority of being protected by law are my concerns and all of above would like to be discussed in the thesis below.