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Freedom of the Press in Latin America: A Thirty-Year Survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Kim Quaile Hill  and
Patricia A. Hurley
Kim Quaile Hill
Affiliation:
University of Houston at Clear Lake City
Patricia A. Hurley
Affiliation:
University of Houston Central Campus
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Freedom of the press has long been considered a critical requirement for the maintenance of democratic government. Most previous writings on the position of the press around the world, however, have argued that restrictions on the press have become generally more numerous in recent years and, hence, press freedom levels have been declining over time. Merrill et al., in their survey of national press systems, note that “recent surveys and studies tend to indicate that in many ways freedom of the press is eroding slowly in a worldwide context. Press laws are proliferating, sanctions of many kinds are growing up to thwart the free workings of the press, and press councils and other groups are moving in to restrict activities of the press.” Survey articles on the state of the press in Africa and in Asia reach the same conclusion for those regions, and a recent report of the prestigious Inter-American Press Association argued that press freedom in the western hemisphere is under greater threat than ever before. Even in some advanced western nations the press has come under attack by governmental officials, as is evident in the United States with both the Nixon administration's antipress activities as well as recent court rulings that limit press coverage of legal proceedings and the secrecy of newsmen's sources and working materials.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , 1980 , pp. 212 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by Latin American Research Review

References

Notes

1. John C. Merrill, Carter R. Bryan, and Marvin Alisky, The Foreign Press (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2d ed., 1970), p. 4.

2. Alhaji Babatundi Jose, “Press Freedom in Africa,” African Affairs 74 (July 1975):255–62; Mori Kyozo, “Freedom of the Press in Asia,” Japan Quarterly 22 (Apr.-June 1975):119–25.

3. New York Times, 21 Oct. 1975, p. 34.

4. Raymond B. Nixon, “Factors Related to Freedom in National Press Systems,” Journalism Quarterly 37 (Winter 1960):13–28, and “Freedom in the World's Press: A Fresh Appraisal with New Data,” Journalism Quarterly 42 (Winter 1965):3–14, 118–19; Ralph L. Lowenstein, “Press Freedom as a Political Indicator,” in H. D. Fischer and J. C. Merrill (eds.), International Communication (New York: Hasting House, 1970), pp. 136–37.

5. Sunwoo Nam and Inhwan Oh, “Press Freedom: Function of Subsystem Autonomy, Antithesis of Development,” Journalism Quarterly 50 (Winter 1973):744–50; Robert W. Jackman, “On the Relation between Economic Development and Democratic Performance,” American Journal of Political Science 17 (Aug. 1973):611–21.

6. For a compendium of the survey data collected to that point and a guide to the original Fitzgibbon and Johnson articles, see Kenneth F. Johnson, “Measuring the Scholarly Image of Latin American Democracy, 1945–1970,” in James W. Wilkie (ed.), Statistical Abstract of Latin America 17 (Los Angeles, Calif.: UCLA Latin American Center, 1976), pp. 347–65. For the 1975 survey data, see Kenneth F. Johnson, “Scholarly Images of Latin American Political Democracy in 1975,” LARR 11, no. 2 (1976):129–40.

7. Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956).

8. Reported in the New York Times, 26 Oct. 1975, p. 14.

9. We should point out that there remain potential limitations on the reliability and validity of these expert-judges data. No systematic analysis has tested the accuracy of such expert evaluations of national attributes. Even more notable is the fact that the extent of expert agreement has not been satisfactorily described for the Fitzgibbon-Johnson data (by reporting measures of dispersion of responses as well as the usual measures of central tendency). Nevertheless, our independent tests of convergent validity lend support to the quality of the press freedom indices used in this paper.

10. For a discussion of “praetorian” political conflict, see Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 192–263.

11. For empirical evidence on this point, see R. D. McKinlay and A. S. Cohan, “Performance and Instability in Military and Nonmilitary Regime Systems,” American Political Science Review 70 (Sept. 1976):850–64.