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.” 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.