Guidelines on press freedom

Press, 12 March 1985, Page 26

Guidelines on press freedom

PA Wellington Guidelines on the meaning of editorial independence, as laid down by the United Kingdom Royal Commission on the Press 1974-77, were referred to yesterday by the Commerce Commission in its decision on the Brierley/NZ News case.

The British commission said it was particularly concerned at the danger to the diversity of opinion and expression which accompanied the growth in concentration of newspapers. It believed that this generated pressures which only editors could resist, and that if editors were to be independent, they should be assured of their basic rights, which it suggested should be:

(a) the right to reject material provided by central management or edi-

torial services; (b) the right to determine the contents of the paper (within the bounds of reasonable economic consideration and the established policy of the publication); (c) the right to allocate expenditure within a budget; (d) the right to carry out investigative journalism; (e) the right to reject advice on editorial policy; (f) the right to criticise the paper’s own group or other parts of the same corporate organisation;

(g) the right to change the alignment of views of the paper on specific issues within its agreed editorial policy; and (h) the right to appoint or dismiss journalists and to decide the terms of their contracts of employment within the established policy of the organisation, and the right to assign journalists to stories.