The freedom of press is one of the universal messages and accepted by most governments in the world. Even though the importance to let the people having the right to know is progressively realized by more and more politicians in non-democracy countries, but the news censorships in these countries are still working and depriving the people’s right to know the truth.
Hiding certain information or providing filtered information to the public is a natural motivation of a government when the information has the potential to challenge or hinder the power of administration, but the interest of the public may be hurt by lacking of the information. That’s why the freedom of press is important to a liberal social system. The notion of freedom of press is incompatible with a dictatorship social system. Liberal intellectuals in the countries ruled by dictatorships have struggled for the freedom of press for decades. However there is no successful case so far. To achieve the goal, the liberal intellectuals need significant support from the people and the politicians in the governance group, to firstly subvert the dictatorship system, like what happened in former Soviet Union.
As one of components of the freedom of press, objectiveness is the most important requirement to the information provided by a journalist. However, objectiveness is difficult to achieve especially in the report about controversial issues. The difficulties are demonstrated in obvious or implied subjective tendentiousness held by the journalist in the report, by the tendentious selection of material and the tendentious writing. In the mean time, many other external factors may affect the objectiveness and independence that the journalist should hold.
