Proceedings of The 4th World Conference on Social Sciences
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Right to Information; a Contemporary Enigma in The Usage of Mass Media
Ama C Siriwardhana
ABSTRACT:
The right to information (RTI), though conferred on masses in common by the Human Rights Declaration and some major global treaties, the beneficiaries are apparently the mass media since they are predestined at pursuing for news, information. The consumers (community) of the information that are distributed by the media, are the second hand beneficiary of RTI. The accuracy, symmetries of the information received by the mass is thus highly influential upon assuring RTI and maintain democracy through the well awareness of the masses. The circumstances as to why the information disseminated by the mass media being contrary to the anticipated objectives of RTI is thus noteworthy. Moreover, the vulnerability of the masses attributable to the inaccurate information received by them lead for the building up of inaccurate general opinion endangering the democracy. Thus, the “disseminating of accurate and balanced information” is of high significance in solving the enigmatic issues in assuring RTI with the complicatedly fostered mass media. The objectives of this research is to apprehend the efficacy of RTI on general public along with their usage of mass media , to examine whether the current approaches towards assuring the disseminating of accurate , balanced information by mass media are sufficient in constituting the fulfillment of RTI. These objectives have been achieved through a deductive research analysis and the results prove that mass media has not sufficiently been upheld as an essential contributor in assuring RTI rather than making media a mere contributor in disseminating accurate news.
keywords: Broadcasting, Democracy, Informativeness, Rightfulness, Self-determination.