Os proprietários dos media e o direito de comunicar A propósito das polémicas mais recentes sobre a relação entre os poderes mediático, político e económico, fica a sugestão da leitura de "Media owners' rights vs. the right to communicate", de Slavko Splichal, publicado este ano na revista Media Development. O resumo:

"In the late 1700s Jeremy Bentham conceived the principle of publicity as a critical impulse against the injustice caused by the secrecy and partiality of state actions, and by Immanuel Kant as an enlightening momentum substantiating human freedom and making citizens equal in the public use of reason. Bentham favoured a free press as an instrument for public control of government in the interest of general happiness.1 Kant respected free public discussion as an instrument for the development and expression of the autonomous rationality of citizens. With the constitutional guarantee of a free press in parliamentary democracies, discussions of freedom of the press were largely reduced to the pursuit of freedom by/for the media, thus neglecting the idea of publicity as the basis of democratic citizenship. Yet, as this article argues, a free press embodied in the property rights of the owners of the press may well fail to achieve either Benthamite or Kantian goals. Such goals should lead to a personal right to communicate rather than to a corporate right to press freedom".