Second-Generation European Data Protection and Professional Journalism

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the legislative interface between data protection and the professional journalistic media under the Data Protection Directive (DPD) and then examines the formal regulatory guidance produced by European Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) during the same period. Despite the DPD’s emphasis on ensuring a careful balancing between equally fundamental rights, statutory provisions at State level were profoundly divergent. In broad terms, Northern European States tended to grant journalism sweeping exemptions from data protection, whilst Southern and Eastern European States set down tough standards even in this sensitive area. These media system differences mapped on to broader cultural fissures concerning individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and attitudes towards power inequalities. In the great majority of cases the national DPA retained a supervisory role in this area and over 60 per cent of these bodies, as well as the Article 29 Working Party, had published some statutory guidance. However, this guidance was often confined to a brief elucidation of the importance of contextual rights balancing coupled, in a number of cases, with an emphasis on promoting a co-regulatory connection between statutory supervision and self-regulation. A minority of DPAs did produce much more extensive guidance focusing especially on children’s rights over data, image rights and visual/audio-visual content, and the right to be forgotten and digital news/media archives.