On The Conflict And Balance Between Privacy And Freedom Of The Press

Human beings have the concept of privacy primitively. However, the privacy right concept of modern times originated from the article "the Privacy Right" published in "Harvard Law Comment" which was written by Samuel · D · Vernon and Louis · D · Prudence in 1980.People have different viewpoints on the concept. As a result, it isn't completely consistent. In my opinion, the main body of the privacy rights consists of natural persons, artificial persons and so on. It doesn't include any social organization or the decedent. Its content involves something "concealed" and "private". That is the private business which the person having the rights is not willing to open to the public. It belongs to the basic rights. So its concept should be like this-one of the basic rights under the protection of the Constitution. It is the right with which a natural person is allowed to conceal all that concerns private affairs and prevent them from disturbing or invading. For sure the performance of any right is limited by law. It can't infringe others.Freedom of press is the freedom that people can take to publish ideas of their own. It is not only the extension ofspeech freedom, but also one of the supervision methods--peopleto government. In addition, it is the basic right protected by the Constitution. This basic right includes news gathering and news reporting freedom. With the development of society, however, news media undertakes not only the task of supervision but the one of entertainment. Media always tends to obtain commercial profits and becomes more popular. As a result, it may infringeother's passive privacy rights when it takes the rights of freedom of press positively. That is why the limit of freedom of press is pinpointed in law. Whatever it is, the absolute principle, obvious and imminent danger principle, 01 challenging speech principle, nothing can scientifically pinpoint a satisfactory limit for freedom of press. In my opinion, the nature of the conflict between freedom of press and privacy rights is that of different profits. We shall compare and analyze them, find importance and reasonableness respectively. Then a value judgement can be made.Privacy right and freedom of press are born conflictively. The conflict between them has never been ceased. The cause of that comes from both the society and the law. The conflict mainly happens in news gathering and news reporting. The former includes: 1. intercept and tapping 2. monitoring and tracking, taking photos or videos without permission 3. breaking into private area 4. exploring others' privacy without revealing his reporter's identity 5. investigating others' personal information or peeping without permission. The latter refers to revealing personal privacy to the public which has nothing to do with public life.In order to balance privacy rights with freedom of press, the most important thing is to make sure what are the essential items of news infringement. In my opinion, these items include the following things: 1.Media has performed the behavior of privacy rights infringement. 2.It has caused damage of privacy rights infringement. 3.There is the cause and effect relation between the infringement behavior and the damage result. 4.Media has subjective fault. Without such essential items as those listed, infringement can't come into being. Thus no relevant infringementresponsibility shall be taken. However, when media performs for the sake of the public profits to realize the function of society supervision and public entertainment, it is inevitable for media to infringe privacy rights. In order to ensure media to perform its freedom thoroughly, refutation sake must be set up for media. If it has refutation sake, media does not form infringement. This is the key to balance freedom of press and privacy rights.Because news infringement dispute began in our country 10 years ago, people have different viewpoints in refutation items of freedom of press. Foreign c...