Читать книгу The Handbook of Communication Rights, Law, and Ethics - Группа авторов - Страница 39

Taking a reductionist view, one could imagine that receiving, reading, hearing, purchasing, and subscribing to content are fairly straightforward for all the types of users described earlier. In reality, exercise of the right to receive information has various facets that one should not oversimplify. The ability to receive content – sometimes referred to as the ability to choose content – carries with it the possibility of receiving all kinds of information and opinions, as well as the possibility of refusing to receive such information and opinions. In a hyperconnected society, the receipt of messages is often involuntary. Spam, social web notifications, and messages from other “push technologies” constantly bombard the user. The channels for receiving information, ideas, and opinions change and evolve over time, but they currently include the following:

free access to newspapers;

paid subscriptions for paper or electronic publications;

pay-per-view content (TV, music, news);

content bundles (for example, press and music, or television and books);

newsfeeds from social websites;

electronic alerts and newsletters;

channels containing advertising;

undesired advertising; and

video streaming (Internet, radio, and TV);

Given the possibility of receiving content over 360°, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – music, radio on the subway, WIFI on airplanes, tablets, and TV in airports – one speaks today of the “right to disconnect” as another part of the “right to receive.” A good example is the US court decision in Hill v. Colorado (2000), which talks about a “right not to receive information”¹³ that is part of freedom of speech in US law.

At the global level, we can say that actively exercising the right to receive or not receive information requires information pluralism (Lecaros 2003, pp. 57–80) – that is, the freedom to create media. The right to receive or not receive information presupposes the freedom to create media, because without such media, there would be no information to receive. Any restriction or administrative condition imposed on the creation of media, in the form of a requirement for authorization, licenses, or concessions, disrupts the ability to create – sometimes gravely so – and reduces media pluralism. This, in turn, disrupts the ability to choose information – that is, to receive it or not. I fear that in developing countries pluralism is scarce. This discrimination can be reduced only by providing Internet access.

Unfortunately, in many countries, the notion that radio and television are state property, as was indeed the case in Europe until the liberalization of the telecommunications industry at the end of the 1990s, has led to a system of licenses and concessions that regulates the existence of audiovisual media. Another challenge to the ability to receive information is legislation that restricts freedom of information. Such legislation runs the gamut from laws that enshrine censorship – which, as we have seen, threaten social websites such as Twitter and Facebook – to content-publishing platforms such as YouTube and even cloud sites like Google Drive, as well as to regulations that restrict specific types of information for religious, social, economic, or political reasons. Any restriction on the dissemination of information is a direct attack on the right to communicate. Of course, freedom has its risks, but they are less evident than the risks that come with the absence of freedom.

Another threat to the ability to receive information, which has been and remains present in many countries, is the excessive presence of the state in media ownership, to the point that private initiatives are squashed or such initiatives must compete with state-run operations at an unfair disadvantage, if for no other reason than that state-run media can draw on government funding and even supplement their budgets from private advertising. Under these circumstances, the right to receive information is annulled or at least weakened, and the state has its own powerful media.

At the opposite extreme lies the hyperconcentration of wealth in private hands in the United States, which has included the development of large media conglomerates. This situation also affects the ability to receive information. When none of the media in a country is public, some voices in that society may go unrepresented, and many perspectives will be neglected, especially in highly fragmented societies. This situation may be exacerbated by the current state of the online news market, characterized by the central role of social media platforms in providing access to the news. These players, whose ownership is also concentrated in a few hands, have an outsized role in controlling both revenue streams for media companies, as they control large parts of the advertising market, and the flow of information itself, as they command large audiences and dictate what news content can reach them, as well as how and when it will do so (see Cetina Presuel and Martínez Sierra 2019).

Other threats to exercising the freedom to receive information, as well as threats to the freedom of selecting information, which all individuals should have, could be mentioned. The most positive solution is to encourage the creation of news companies that have a clear commitment to independence and a strong sense of responsibility as expressed by Nieto¹⁴ (1973). Several such examples of new media have emerged in recent years, such as journalist societies (sociétés de rédacteurs). These may not resolve problems completely, but they do allow business risks to be spread over diverse stakeholders.