Research On The Conflict And Solution Between Press Freedom And The Right Of Privacy

Both press freedom and the right of privacy are basic rights provided in the constitution and the laws. Along with the news media's expansion, the continual maturity of civil rights consciousness and privacy expressly provided in the civil law, the press freedom and privacy conflicts with each other more generally. Therefore, it is especially important to discuss the conflicts between them and to build the model to solve their conflicts.Press freedom is the freedom for news media and its practitioners to interview and to report the news freely, its theoretical basis mainly includes free market theory, the fourth power theory, right to know the knowledge theory. The right of privacy become a legal concept protected by not until modern times. It means one has the right to deter others from intervening his\her private information and field.Therefore, press freedom has the nature of openness, and the right of privacy has the nature of secrecy. The conflict between them because of the vagueness of rights, the antagonistic nature of rights, the expansion of rights'running, and the shortage of regulations give rise to their conflicts. Seeing from the operating practice, the conflicts between press freedom and privacy is a two-way street. When press freedom infringe privacy, it mainly through news interview methods and contents. News interview methods can be divided into lens invasion, alias interviews, hidden photography and recording, tracking secretly, and so on. The news reports'contents include disclosure and error report of other people's privacy. On the other hand, privacy is likely to take excessive defense to press freedom, and this will affect social information in circulation, weaken the supervision function of news media, and isolate individuals and society extremely.In modern society, the conflict should be solved by the construction of rule of law order. The worldwide solving patterns mainly include right-hierarchy model and the model of measuring in concrete case. The deadly defect of this model is that the absolute status between rights is unreasonable, it ignores the diversity and complexity social life, while specific case judgment pattern has relative rationality. But in the implementation process it is too abstract, and it will do harm to judicial consistency and fairness. So we should claims a model fused abstract and concrete thinking, then the legal flexibility can be achieved without loss in judicial stability and consistency.In China, there are several ways to solve this problem. First, we should perfect the relevant legislations clearing the boundary of citizens'privacy rights, the constitutive requirements of news torture, the defenses to news torture, and courts'steps in measuring press freedom and privacy. Secondly, we should build case guidance system when judging the conflicts between press freedom and privacy. Finally, we should strengthen the supervision and self-discipline of news industry.