Audience's Right To Know, From A Legal Perspective

The protection and realization of the general public's right to know is an essential criterion to a civilized society and an important part of socialism democracy. We must do related research and study in order to set up and improve the institution of the general public's right. This article starts from the right of general public and analyzes general public's right to know from the perspective of Jurisprudence.Based on the broad definition of the right to know, the concept of the general public' right to know brought up by this dissertation is one of this kind presented in certain situation of media and includes the general principal and theory of function of the right to know. Namely, the right to know of general public, it means the freedom and right of general public to ' have the access to the information hold by the government as public authority through mass media and the transparency and disclosure of the government itself, which is a crucial part of the political right of citizens in present democratic society.General public's right to know is one of the general public rights. Each right has certain boundary and it will be limited when it infringes other rights while carrying out. The Article 51 of PR China's Constitution sets out that Chinese citizen can't infringe the benefits of nation, society and groups and legitimate freedom and right of other citizens. The legitimate limitation of general public's right to know is that: general public has no right to know when it comes to national secrets, business secrets of others and personal privacy. The reason is that national secret concerns the protection of right of all citizens as well as national existence and development; others' business secrets concern others' economic right; personal privacy falls in to the category of their own rights. This dissertation focuses on the jurisprudential analysis of general public's right to know and privacy.The institution of general public's right to know is incomplete, the main problem is that: the constitution implicates the general public's right to know indirectly in stead of direct recognition of this right as a basic citizen right in words; the incomplete transparency and disclosure of government information; the lack of the protective institution of general public's right to know.Now that we are making efforts to build up a law-oriented society, it is necessary to perfect the system of general public's right to know and realize this right. The general public's right to know is an effective solution to eliminating confusion and contradicts and building up harmonious society under the circumstance of diversity of economy and social interests which easily gives rise to and accumulate conflicts. Besides, as the development of information society, the usage of information has become a basic life style, only if we keep the free flow of information and assure the perfect enjoyment of general public's right to know, the quality of citizens can be improved and the healthy development of the society and economy can be assured. Therefore, we need to enhance the construction of public's right to know institution during the process of law-oriented society realization.