Freedom of speech and press in the West

One of the long-standing allegations of hostile or unfriendly organizations and individuals often touted that Vietnam does not have freedom of speech and freedom of the press. As such claims but the truth behind is they deliberately ignore the fact that even in the West, where has been called “free world”, freedom of speech and freedom of the press is just utopia.

When assessing the quality of speech freedom or press freedom in the West, we can not ignore a statement quoted many times: “Freedom of the press is free to disseminate the opinion of the 200 wealthiest people”. Read or listen to this statement, those who do not know the author will easily think that this is the opinion of people who do not understand the problem or is perceived subjectively. But those words were written by a historical witness, he is Paul Sethe - citizen of Germany, a renowned journalist who was also a writer and researcher of social science. After World War II, he was a founder of the well-known newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - one of the largest newspapers in Germany at present. After that he became a commentator for many other popular newspaper in the region using the German such as Die Welt (The World), Die Zeit (Time), the magazine Stern (Star). To explain why he had made such an assessment, he wrote: “Since the publication of newspapers and magazines always require large amounts of capital (the word he used in German is Kapital - HNT), the group made the press agencies will be smaller regularly. Thereby our dependence is growing more and more dangerous”. However he also said, as for the press in Germany there were “oases where the winds of freedom are subtle”. An interesting fact is that many people do not know that the immortal words which he wrote as a reader sent to the famous magazine Spiegel (Mirror) and they were firstly printed. Until now, the words of Paul Sethe is considered relatively to the true idea of the relationship between press freedom and “Kapital”. His assessment is the result of observation of press freedom in everyday life, but for a comprehensive assessment of press freedom we must first consider the legal provisions relating to freedom of the press in a country.

A long-standing problem that it is still hotly debated when it comes to freedom of the press in the West is deceiving the public by the media. So far there have been many evidences of this phenomenon. For example, the fool by unreported or reported false events. In order to detect the campaign to deceive the public by the media, we went back to the newspapers or articles about the war in the last decade and compared with data collected after this news was opened or decoded, including the invasion of Vietnam. Thus, the understanding of speech freedom and press freedom in the West will help us to recognize and have objective assessment of press freedom in Vietnam. A fact could not be denied that the human rights situation in Vietnam in general, speech and press freedom in particular have continuously improved, developed in the last decade. On that basis, it can not accept the condituon that a number of individuals proclaim themselves “independent journalists” and give the lack constructive comments. By not be considered as journalists, though the “independent journalists” while they only offer news and false commentaries to defame the government, denying the achievements which they are beneficiaries.