Press freedom and national development: Toward a re-conceptualization

Abstract

This paper criticizes the mainstream studies of international press freedom for economic determinism and negligence of important elements such as the notion of power and cultural context. This paper suggests that the notions of "civil society" and the "public sphere" can be utilized as better indicators of press freedom than modernization indices such as per capita income, literacy rates and daily newspaper circulation. Because institutions of civil society and the public sphere are inherently grounded in the history and culture of a society, an adequate analysis of them is expected to yield rich insights about contextual conditions which largely determine the degree of press freedom in a society.