In upholding freedom and in expanding education, social reform, and change, the importance of the media is unique. This uniqueness is best explained by a statement made by Mahatma Gandhi: “One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand the popular feeling and give expression to it, another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects."
Democracy necessitates that people should have the right to know the activities of the government, especially the decision of the government that affects their life, liberty, and property. To make choices regarding people’s participation in the society, information is important. Adequate information helps people to decide rationally.
The media -- both print and electronic -- thus helps people know what is happening around the world and equip them with the elements of modernity.The media also make public services more approachable to the people by publicizing information. A responsible media similarly helps in the socialization of people into citizenship, democratization of the state and political society, institutionalization of civic culture through free flow of information, and rationalized use of power in social relations. In a democracy like Bangladesh, the media can also help voters with the contents of civic and political education and strengthen the culture of democracy.
Article 39 of the Constitution guarantees freedom of thought as well as speech, expression, and the press, subject to some restrictions. This implies that the right to information has become a human and constitutional right for the Bangladeshi people. This suggests that free access to information on matters of public importance has become a core of the governing process. As a result, eventually, in 2009 the government ratified the Right to Information (RTI) Act. In fact, the key element of good governance postulates three essential features: legitimacy, accountability, and transparency -- the last element being the core basis of media culture.
Governance is the exercise of political, economic and administrative authority to manage a nation’s affairs. Governance that steers in normative order to achieve its goals -- law and order, human and national security, voice and participation and the promotion of public goods -- is called good governance. According to the World Bank “good governance is epitomized by predictable and enlightened policy making; a bureaucracy imbued with a professional ethos; an executive arm of government accountable for its actions; a strong civil society participating in public affairs; and all behaving under the rule of law.”
Transparency, including the right to disclosure, can thus be an important category of instrumental freedom.
The freedoms of thought, conscience, and speech are recognized in the Constitution as fundamental rights and the right to information is an alienable part of it. Since all powers of the republic belong to the people, it is necessary to ensure the right to information for their empowerment.
The RTI Act in Bangladesh makes provisions for ensuring the free flow of information and people’s right to information. The right to information shall ensure that transparency and accountability in all public, autonomous, and statutory organizations and in private organizations run on government or foreign funding shall increase, corruption shall decrease, and good governance shall be established.
So, right to information is a crucial ground for good governance. Media as a key component of the civil society is testing the rights given to them in public affairs.
A question arises
Is the right to information context-free? This question can be answered in the present scenario. Knowledge on the right to information is not context-free. In Bangladesh, though the adult literacy rate has increased from 58.8% in 2011 to 74.9% in 2020, like per capita income, the instruments of the media are unevenly distributed among the various geographic regions. Rural people usually get less exposure than urban people. This means they are less “visible” in policy and decision-making affairs.
It has been observed that, while the government media are controlled by the party in power and tend to produce “biased news and views,” some of private media are run by individuals, business tycoons, and politicians which articulate “private and partisan news and views,” and, therefore, fail to illuminate and enlighten the public to their fullest.
However, in Bangladesh, an optimistic trend can be observed from seminar proceedings, official documents and secondary data which illustrates that the magnitude of media access and content coverage have grown in size and dimension, even though more empirical research is needed to clarify the accurate status of the media.
It is being suggested that politicization, polarization, and sectorization should not prevail in the Bangladeshi media culture, rather it should help in forming democracy, public opinion, and enlarge the sphere of the public to rationally debate, argue, and reach conclusionstowards social change.
To achieve that, it is important to give media persons proper training on democratic principles so that they do not violate the laws of the land and the “life-world” of the nation. Only a media culture rooted in the public life of the nation can adequately articulate the right to information, which is also the essence of good governance.
Freedom of citizens, a free and responsible press, an independent judiciary and government data information are the system which can be perceived to be the key to the enhancement of right to information and make the institutions of governance transparent and accountable. So, the RTI Act should be implemented properly to help in the way of freedom of information, enforce the accountability of information as well as to endow substance and quality in democratic debates so that citizens can monitor the day-to-day functioning of public institutions and actors.
The right to information is closely tied to the accountability mechanism, for monitoring every action of the government; which leads to good governance, places the dominant actors of governance -- the state, the market, and the civil society -- in balance, and monitors their performance as per the boundaries for action defined for them.
The media thus performs the vital tasks of informing, socializing, communicating, and articulating the power of the public and preparing them for social transformation and good governance. A free and open media is vital for the health and wealth of a nation.
Faria Sultana is an Assistant Professor at the American International University-Bangladesh.
