Discussion On Press Freedom And Justice

In the modern country ruled with laws, freedom of press and judicialjustice are the two bases for the social fair system. How to make a clearboundary between them or well treat their relations is an importantproblem that country under the rule of law has to face. Although therehave been a lot of scholars carrying out quest for this, the problem hasnot been perfectly solvable. Especially along with the rise of thenetwork medium, the problem becomes more complicated. Therefore, itis necessary to continue to inquire into this problem thoroughly, whichstill has academic value and reality meaning.There are many writings about this field. After combing theviewpoints of scholars carefully, the author discovered that although theangle was different, the scholars reached consensus in some basicquestions. For instance, they all affirmed that freedom of press andjudicial justice as two kinds of values were like wise no less important,and could not make choice but seek balance between them. However,many problems are debatable, such as what is the substance of theconflict between t freedom of press and judicial justice. The scholarsusually discuss the relations between medium and judicature fromdifferent angles, such as freedom of press and judicature independence,freedom of the press and fair trial, media supervision and judicatureindependence, media supervision and judicial justice and so on. But thisarticle considers the relationship between medium and judicatureessentially are the relation between freedom of the press and judicialjustice. Because if there is no freedom of press, the media supervisionwill be out of the question; And whether judicial independence or fairtrial, the purpose in all this is to achieve judicial justice.This article is divided into four parts.The first part elaborates the connotation and the function of thefreedom of press respectively from the general theory angle. Becausewhenever talk about freedom of press, many articles use massive similar concepts and terminologies, of which the contents are actually various,and have no clear understandings about the right nature of the freedomof press, especially mix the freedom of press, expression freedom, andfreedom of speech up. Therefore in this part the author emphaticallyclarifies these related concepts. This thesis believes that freedom ofpress exists as an independent value and cannot be substituted in thedemocratic society. The functions of it lie in passing information, thedemocratic participation in and supervisory.The second part discusses the implication of judicial justice as wellas the two major factors restricting judicial justice, such as judicialindependence, and judicial disclose. These two factors are closelyrelated to freedom of press.The third part is the primary part of this thesis. First, it analyzes therelations between freedom of press and judicial justice emphatically, andproposes a view that these two values don't have essential conflict, andthey are consistent in target that all for promoting the social fair andprotecting the human rights, just pursuing the targets in their own way.Only when we have to make a choice between these two values, theconflict is brought. Second, owing to the views of what is the substanceof the conflict between freedom of press and judicial justice aredebatable and the scholars disagree with each other, so the authorsummarizes these views into three kinds of explications, and points outeach merit and shortcoming after comparing these explications, finallyapproves of the second explication that the substance of the conflictbetween them is the conflict between right and power in fact. At last, thethesis analyzes how to make choice and to balance them during theconflict. This thesis thinks, to strengthen the protection of freedom ofpress is to strengthen the guarantee of human rights. We should tend toprotect freedom of press in advance, based on this, restrict news oreditorial properly.In order to solving the actual problems in China, the fourth partpays attention to the present condition of the relations between freedom of press and judicial justice at first, then carefully examines "mediajudgment" from another angle, and take the "Xinghua-Qiu case" as anexample to dialyze the impact to judicature which is brought by newsreport and public opinion. Especially, the network medium plays animportant role in it. The huge influence of network will increase thecontradictions between freedom of press and judicial justice. But thisthesis believes that the rise of network is beneficial to preventing "mediajudgment". At last, some suggestions are put forward for the legislationsand jurisdictions in China for constructing the reasonable relations betweenthem.