Role of Working Journalists in New Constitution

Introduction

Nepalese citizens and leaders are engaged in the collective choice of national visioning process. Journalists are the effective vehicles to enable their informed participation in it. The special circumstance of Nepal—political transition from violent conflict to peace—requires working journalists to play constructive roles both to defend their rights and the rights of citizens. It is definitely challenging because of high political dynamics, erosion of governance functions and complication in the process of achieving the fundamental tasks set by the Interim Constitution and Comprehensive Peace Agreement: drafting of a democratic constitution; building inclusive constitutional state, broad-based social, economic and political reforms, durable peace and management of conflict residues. How can media workers help to achieve these goals?

The self-perception of journalists is crystal clear: powerful custodian of public interest. Any event, issue or policy the attentive public find useful is newsworthy and reported in the press. This establishes the fact that news is a public property. Any effort to privatize, stifle and deform the news undermines the very public duty journalists fiercely stand to defend and mirror the rhythm of public mood. "Public's right to know," included into every democratic constitution thus seeks to establish free flow of information through the autonomy of media from the society's dominant structures.

Access to information is central to inform citizens about the essential requirement of democratic order and mitigate the social tensions fuelled by distorted communication of ideology, interest and identity. This is the reason "autonomy" or free-will is enthusiastically defended by journalists, publishers, owners, independent court, civil society and ordinary citizens. Without the autonomy of public sphere for deliberation and action where media is situated, neither the democratization of communication industries is possible nor does it enable journalists to work in the general interest of public life. What are the roles working journalists have to perform in the framing of Nepal's new constitution? How can Nepalese press unions become relevant to realize the necessary preconditions for media workers' constitutional needs? How can they become useful to synthesize the opposing conceptions of democracy and human rights political parties are hotly debating and manage the tension between popular sovereignty and constitutionalism? What are the mechanisms to make democracy a self-binding ideal? This essay intends to deal these questions in brief.

Civic Education is the Key Role of Media

Journalists are the most effective mechanism capable of translating constitutional concepts into every day languages to make them understandable to ordinary citizens, carry out critical discourse and engage citizens into legal deliberation out of a sense of public duty.  As a "watchdog of democracy," the press protects the freedom and rights of citizens against the encroachment by powerful actors— government, corporate groups and even non-state militant ones. Democracy is at stake if only the powerful voice is totted up as a voice of reason. If the mini-voices are consigned into invisibility, out of sight and out of picture, media suffers from a culture of pluralism and can contribute less to the formation of national identity. Lobby groups for reasons of power, wealth and advertisement of their products tend to be group-enclosed rather than opened to contesting visions and perspectives about constitutional issues. Socialization of people into citizenship through effective learning is crucial to increase their awareness of their rights and duties, stake in the political system and conscious participation in constitutional talk. Group-enclosed media reflects only the partial conception of reality in news, public opinion, agenda-setting and rational will-formation. Only democratization of media releases the potential for a pluralist sense of justice.

Context-Sensitivity

The struggle of journalists to participate in the constitution making constitutes the core debates to influence the democratic evolution of the country that involves also media rules and sincere implementation of Press Union Act.  The CA has entailed discursive law—making process as major criteria for constitution-making and public ownership in it. Working journalists have important responsibility to defend "social justice," of media workers in the government and corporate sectors, who find it difficult to balance between the values and needs required by their profession to defend and the profit imperative of media owners. But, there are grey areas also. Small media houses maintain no boundary between owners, reporters and editors as they play multiple tasks. The context-sensitivity requires media to overcome structural injustice and inequities as media is a key rationalizer of society towards modernity.  

Public Interest above All other Values

Collection of views of public figures and ordinary citizens, articles, opinions and facts on constitutional matters is important to shape public opinion and political will-formation. Knowledge about legal, social, economic, political and ecological issues enables citizens an informed participation on public affairs and continuous rationalization of laws. This makes political change peaceful. Citizens require not only a great multitude of "facts" but varied critical and comparative "perspectives" about issues, needs and concerns. Very often in a race to produce first news facts are sometimes distorted, exaggerated and even concocted. Such an event undermines their media code and ethics. It then cannot perform perspective mediating or communicating function. Conflict sensitivity of journalists also requires them to normatively work towards highlighting the common ground, than what divides the society and inform, educate and stimulate public interest in the resolution of political and constitutional questions.  

Vocational Ethos precedes Personal Interest of Journalists

Observation of actions of politicians and constant reminding them of their duty of drafting the new constitution are two vocational ethoses. Since the rules of political morality are created by politicians themselves—journalists must adequately inform the public and provide them critical sense of inquiry to judge their attitude, behavior and action towards their given duty as to whether they are merely jostling for power or working to achieve the common good—the constitution in time. Major political functions of journalists can be subsumed under five categories: aggregation of public interests; articulation of their demands; proper channeling of demands through 14 committees of Constituent Assembly; two-way communication between politicians and society for the mediation of perspectives and support the public strategy of collective action in the entire cycle of constitution drafting.

Freedom of the Press is a Lynchpin of Democratic system

The spread of rational analytical skills has spread the values of greater openness to social change, put critical questions on dogmatism, existing institutions and legitimacy patterns. The conscious control of human ideas, institutions and practices has moved into private life as what is called private (domestic violence, child abuse, suicide, etc) has become public and constitutional. This has expunged the liberal separation between the public and the private sphere and politicized the social conception of rights. The Interim Constitution of Nepal has further extended the domain of rights from civil and political to social, economic, cultural and ecological and endorsed the cause of media and civil society for the liberation of oppressed. Constitutional public discourse in the media about these changing conceptions of public life is important to make change process peaceful.

Freedom of the press in a democracy is important for the freedom of the citizens. Popular sovereignty and right to information are correlated. Earlier times, freedom entailed freedom from government authority only. But, now owing to the de-centering of power, the sources of threat to freedom have become diffused. The geographical, social and economic concentration of media in Nepal and the condition of structural injustice have limited the utility of "right to information" except than the urban areas. Similarly, weak human rights condition has not made media persons immune from the fear of attack by cadres of militant groups. Expansion of communicative space is a major task of media organization to bring the "condition of public life" of Nepalese into deliberation and visibility as well as liberate them from a sense of fear. The cut-throat competition among the media owners in urban areas for standardization of information and commentaries have oriented them toward commercialism while the rural and remote parts of Nepal have to face information deficit, financial crunch as advertising agencies are almost non-existent and suffer from a lack of professionalism. Monopoly, censorship, inadequate laws, condition of trepidation and human rights abuse, etc weaken the power of media to express truth to power and foster civic culture.

Enlightenment, rather than Information, is the virtue of Good Journalism

Posted on : 2009-06-03 06:21:24

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