Making Sense of Press Freedom: A Comparison of Journalists’ Perceptions of Press Freedom in Eastern Europe and East Asia

With the global spread of democracy, values such as freedom, individuality and the rule of law have gained universal appeal.1 Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are at the heart of this set of values. Indeed, the free public exchange of ideas is regarded as a defining element of democracy that underpins the rationality of popular decision-making and the balance of power between government and society. However, freedom of the press remains one of the most vulnerable achievements in the new democracies that have emerged over the past quarter of a century, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. While there is a broad body of litera- ture that analyses how state and economic power infringe on the independ- ence of the press (Freedom House, annual reports; Paletz and Jakubowicz 2003; Price et al. 2002; Willnat and Aw 2008), little is known about how the agents of press freedom, i.e. journalists, interpret press freedom and how this affects their professional practices.