A FREE PRESS IS LINKED WITH FREE ENTERPRISE & A FREE SOCIETY

Summary

In this brief 1960 leaflet — originally published in the New Delhi journal ‘The Editor’ and reprinted by the Forum of Free Enterprise — Dr. Sachin Sen, then editor of the ‘Indian Nation’ (Patna) and former President of the All-India Newspaper Editors’ Conference, argues that a free press is structurally inseparable from free enterprise and a free society. His core claim is that democracy requires autonomous institutions, and the press must function as one such institution: free from State coercion, free from party discipline, and free from the obligation to serve any government’s ideological agenda.

Sen draws a pointed contrast between liberal democracy and Communist democracy. In a liberal democracy, freedom of the press means access to objective truths; in a communist party-state, the press merely transmits party truths. He insists that press freedom consists in the freedom to gather, print, and comment on news without prompting from any extraneous authority — and that any newspaper feeding its readers one-sided views may win political battles but does not serve the cause of liberal democracy. The leaflet closes with a direct warning: those who frown on free enterprise and a free society are the grave-diggers of the free Press.

Key points

• The Press must function as an autonomous institution, not a subservient arm of the State or ruling party.

• Democracy demands that the Press be nurtured as an autonomous institution because the State, though supreme in theory, is in practice controlled by those who hold the coercive apparatus.

• A sharp contrast is drawn between liberal democracy (where press freedom means access to objective truths via trial-and-error methods) and Communist democracy (where the press is an organ of party truths).

• Press freedom is defined operationally: the freedom to gather and receive news and to comment on it, without prompting from any extraneous authority.

• Pressmen are not artillery for any party or government; their role is to serve society and to widen the horizon of the people.

• A newspaper may win a political bout with one-sided news but it does not serve the cause of liberal democracy.

• Free press, free enterprise, and free society are presented as a single, mutually dependent triad — opponents of any one are ‘the grave-diggers of the free Press’.