FREEDOM OF PRESS VIS-A-VIS RIGHT TO PRIVACY: JURISPRUDENTIAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

Privacy, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis pronounced it as “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” Commentators have declared it “essential to democratic government,” critical to “our ability to create and maintain different sorts of social relationships with different people,” necessary for “permitting and protecting an autonomous life,” and important for “emotional and psychological tranquillity.”  

It has been hailed as “an integral part of our humanity,” the “heart of our liberty,” and “the beginning of all freedom”. Individual privacy, as a human right, is essential for the fullest realization of innate characteristics which nature has bestowed on human beings. Such a right is necessary to ensure the dignity of every person irrespective of one's race, religion, nationality, language, sex or any other factor. If we look at the rights perspective of media, then they may claim that they have the right to exercise their professional rights, to investigate and to report the truth. But even individual or professional rights have to be widely recognized as such by the “Society” for them to be individual or professional rights. There should be a balance between individual assertion and societal recognition.i Privacy is the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others (self-information control right).ii In this age of mass media, individual privacy has become a casualty of journalists’ feeding frenzy and it has become really hard for societies to determine the nature and process of information in the public domain and the rest has been taken care by the un-clear regulatory regime which is a cause of trouble for both the authorities and individuals