On citizens' right to information: Justification and analysis of the democratic right to be well informed

Abstract

One of the crucial questions that lawyers, philosophers, politicians, and journalists struggled with during the twentieth century was how to “guarantee that informative and accurate news would flow to the public through the press.”1 Traditional answers to this question assumed that the key to a well-informed citizenry lay within speech rights. The idea was that speech rights would create a rich flow of information from which diligent citizens could learn the important facts and form their own views about public issues.

However, in digital democracies, speech rights are very well entrenched, yet many people are still largely uninformed. To be sure, ignorance is sometimes the result of negligence, but it is undeniable that citizens are often the victims of disinformation campaigns, fake news, and personalized online propaganda. These phenomena make it difficult to understand public issues even if one is disposed to do so. And, importantly, they seem to confirm what scholars like Lebovic himself—but also Lippmann or Habermas—have lamented: speech rights are not enough to guarantee that the public receives an adequate supply of news. The traditional answer to Lebovic's question is, then, at least partially incorrect.

Drawing on these insights, this article shifts the focus from speech rights towards the rights of the public, and argues that, if we want to guarantee that an adequate supply of news reaches the public, we need to start taking more seriously the idea that citizens have a right to be well informed. As I will show, this idea repeatedly appears in journalism theory and practice, as well as in democratic and legal theory, but it remains a somewhat vague notion: it is not clear what it might mean, nor what its normative implications could be. This article aims to fill this conceptual gap by conceptualizing what I will call citizens' right to information (henceforth CRI).

One motivation for theorizing CRI is to show that a positive right of the citizenry to be provided with quality news is—contrary to appearances—fully compatible with free speech and journalistic freedoms. The key here lies in conceiving this as a moral right which imposes moral—but not legal—obligations on journalists while, at the same time, compelling the state to foster quality journalism through adequate media policies. Seen in this light, CRI may become a useful landmark whose conceptual clarification could illuminate other discussions, such as journalism ethics. Indeed, it seems that journalists' special democratic rights and duties could hardly be explained without assuming something like CRI. Moreover, CRI might illuminate the discussion on what journalism can mean in our digital era—in which the line separating professional journalists from lay citizens is increasingly blurred—by linking the profession to an ethical commitment to provide citizens with the information they, as such, have a right to. Finally, the concept of CRI might also be useful to guide the discussion of alternative models for quality journalism, which has been recently sparked by the collapse of the traditional advertisement-based funding system. After all, such discussion—just as that of media policy, including Lebovic's question—could be seen as a debate on what is the best way to provide citizens the informational service they have a right to. Of course, all these discussions can be only superficially addressed here. But by connecting them to CRI, this article will offer a perspective to look at them afresh.

The article is structured as follows. Section II lays the groundwork for a democratic right to be well informed, by reviewing previous appearances of this idea, and by contextualizing it within the map of communication rights. Section III offers a systematic framework for justifying and conceptualizing CRI. After showing four possible ways to justify this right, I proceed to spell out its four main characteristics. First, its function is to ensure that citizens are provided with a good informational service that enables them to become well informed and therefore competent political decision-makers. Second, and consequently, its right-holders are all those with participatory rights. Third, its content is not what people want to know, or any kind of information about politics, but specifically information that is useful for updating political knowledge (that is, democratically relevant information). Finally, its two main correlative duties apply, respectively, to journalists and to the state.

These two last characteristics—the content and the correlative duties of CRI—are highly controversial: any complete answer to them requires committing to contested normative claims about democracy. My strategy for navigating these difficulties is to draw a distinction between the general concept of CRI and its different conceptions. The general concept, I contend, concerns the democratic, moral, and positive right of citizens to be offered democratically relevant information. As I will argue, accepting this general concept does not require endorsing any contested claims about democracy. It is only when we try to fine-tune the content or the correlative duties of CRI that we need to take sides on issues upon which disagreement abounds. Each one of these specific, but controversial, definitions of CRI constitutes one plausible conception of this right. This article, I have to say, will not identify—much less defend—any of these conceptions. Rather, its purpose is just to lay out an analytical framework for further discussion, about both the concept and the different conceptions of CRI.

Despite being incomplete, this analysis will be enough to distinguish the right to be well informed from two other rights with which it is often confounded: freedom of information and the public's right to know.

The idea that citizens have a right to receive democratically relevant information is well established in democratic societies. It repeatedly appears in journalism theory and practice, as well as in democratic and legal theory, albeit under different names. In this section, I first offer a brief overview of these appearances, which—despite using different nomenclature—share the intuition that citizens have a right to be well informed. I then locate this idea on the map of communication rights, defining it as a right of the public, rather than as a speech right.

Against the backdrop of the previous section, in the remainder of this article I will put forward a systematic framework for both justifying and analyzing CRI. This framework comprises five features: grounds, function, right-holders, content, and correlative duties. In spelling out these traits, I will compare CRI to other communication rights, which will help not only to better clarify it, but also to shed light on its difference from these other rights—further emphasizing the existing conceptual gap within communication rights.

In this article I have tried to clarify the meaning and the implications of the idea that citizens have a democratic right to be well informed, an idea which, despite being intuitively appealing and frequently invoked, has remained largely under-theorized. After reviewing some of its previous appearances in different disciplines, I located this conceptual gap on the map of communication rights where this right belongs, defining it as a right of the public. Subsequently, I offered a systematic framework for justifying and analyzing this idea by conceptualizing citizens' right to information (CRI) as the moral, democratic, and positive right that citizens have to be offered the information they need to be well informed, so that they can update their political knowledge and make adequate political choices.

Trying to avoid controversies, I have limited myself to delineating the general concept of CRI, and have refrained from discussing in detail its plausible specific conceptions. Although incomplete, this characterization has proven enough to show not only that CRI is compatible with journalistic freedoms, but also that it is conceptually different from the other two best-known rights of the public: freedom of information (FOI) and the public's right to know (PRK).

Of course, much clarification is still needed regarding both the general concept and more specific conceptions of CRI, but the idea that citizens have a democratic right to be well informed now seems clearer than before. What is more, by indicating where disagreement is particularly stark, this analysis has revealed the argumentative battles that one must wage to defend any specific conception of CRI. These are the battles we must fight if we want to answer, among other things, Lebovic's longstanding question about how to guarantee that an adequate supply of news reaches the public.

This research was financed by an FPU fellowship (ref. FPU15/7227), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, and has also benefited from the Justice at Work project (ref. PGC2018-095917-A-I00), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, the Spanish Research Agency, and the European Regional Development Fund.

There are no potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article.

The author declares human ethics approval was not needed for this study.