One role of the media in a democracy is that of watchdog over government. The idea is that the press should dig up facts and warn the public when officials are doing something wrong. Citizens can hold officials accountable for setting things right only if they know about errors and wrongdoing.

The First Amendment to the Constitution ("Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom … of the press") helps ensure that the news media will be able to expose officials' misbehavior without fear of censorship or prosecution. This is a treasured American right that is not available in many other countries. Under dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes, the media are usually tightly controlled. Even in a democratic country such as Great Britain, strict secrecy laws limit what the press can say about certain government activities. In many countries, including France, Israel, and Sweden, the government owns and operates major television channels and makes sure that the programs are not too critical.¹ In Brazil, licenses for television and radio stations are awarded by the Ministry of Communications to political supporters. In some Brazilian states, about one-half of the delegates to Congress own a TV or radio station. At the national level, several powerful politicians and party leaders run media empires that include television networks and newspapers in the major cities. ² In Mexico, television was a state monopoly and major newspapers were careful to toe the line because of the threat of political reprisals during the three-quarter-century long rule by the PRI party, but with the coming of privatization under Salinas in the 1990s and the defeat of the PRI at the national level in 2000, the news media have become more aggressive in their watchdog role, though critics claim they remain somewhat fearful of powerful political leaders. In Japan, though television, radio, and newspapers are formally independent of government, there is a widespread system of "press clubs," sponsored by politicians and government agencies, where journalists and the people they write about come to know each other well and where membership among journalists is highly prized. Although freedom of the press is far from perfect in the United States, the news media enjoy greater freedom than their counterparts in other democratic countries. In many non-democratic countries, moreover, press freedom hardly exists at all, with government censorship of the press and intimidation of journalists, all too common.³

²Frances Hagopian, "Politics in Brazil," in Gabriel A. Almond, G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Daare Strom, and Russell J. Dalton (eds.), Comparative Politics Today (New York: Pearson Longman Publishers, 2004), p. 240. ³Doris A. Graber, Mass Media and American Politics (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), chapter 3.

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