| With the progress of time and the development of society, news is more and more related to law. Large numbers of lawsuits on the basis of news torts have appeared recently. When news communication is in conflict with a citizen's or legal person's rights,law has to be applied, and that is described as lawsuits of news torts. This indicates reinforcements of national consciousness of legality and increases the publics voice. Freedom of the Press is one of the fundamental freedoms in democratic nations. It plays an important role in supervising government, listening to the people, ensuring and promoting the democratic systems and individual development. Personal rights, including kinds of rights such as right to health, human dignity, personal freedom and the right to name, image, reputation and privacy, is enjoyed by civil subjects and is necessary to assert their own personality. Personal right is one of the basic rights in civil laws. Its object is the safety and integrity of body and mental activities, aimed at maintaining freedom, dignity and safety of the subjects. So the affirmation and protection of personal rights act as one of the important means to realize and maintain independence of personality and to promote an individual's development. When Freedom of the Press conflicts with a citizen's personality, which right is important? And how should we keep a balance between these two kinds of rights? This article focuses on the general theory and basic chrematistics of news torts, applies concept analysis, legal interpretation and comparative method to analyze fundamental theory about news tort and its forms, characters, category and relief's and puts forward good suggestions for news torts, guidance of public opinions and protections of personality. The first part introduces and explores the general theories of media torts. Firstly it defines the legal concept of news, torts and act of torts. Then it analyzes the concept of news torts,constitutive condition, characteristic and the remedies of damage. News torts indicate the behavior of news departments or newsmen who, by means of mass media, made story on purpose or negligent report, propagate to the public some improper contents or contents forbidden by the law and bring infringement on the right of integrity of citizen and legal person. News torts are different from general torts, because it has the unique constitutive conditions. For example, the news is illegal; the news which has the improper contents has been published; the causality represents that victim can be identified and the doer has the subjective fault. Characteristics of news torts can be expressed in subject, content and object. When news torts happen, we can take two remedies: non-asset remedies and compensation for damage. The second part introduces the three typical types of news torts: news that injures a person's reputation, news that infringes on a persons right to privacy and news injures a persons image rights. As the citizen's personality reputation right, privacy right and image right have close contact. In fact, they are the material representation of personality and they protect the citizen's personality from different way. The object of news torts is the spiritual right which mainly contains reputation right, privacy right and image right. Anyzation for the three typical styles of news torts is very important for the theory and operation of news torts. At first we identified the legal concept of the three styles, and then we analyzed the form and plead reason of the three styles. The third part is the evaluation and suggestion for legislation of News torts. There are some problems in our legislation of news torts:our constitution doesn't stipulate the freedom of news;we have no special act of news publish;we don't regulate the material balance principle for the conflict between the freedom of news and the protection of personality Aim at the actuality of our news legislation, the article offered some suggestion: we should stipulate the act of news which adapt for our own circumstances as soon as possible; affirm that the right of privacy is an absolute personality; establish the integrated legal system for protecting the right of privacy; perfect the legal protection for acitizen's image right. |
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