ABSTRACT
Public policy debate concerning self-regulation of the media is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, public opinion in democratic states tends to support self-regulation enthusiastically where the alternative is regulation by the state. On the other hand, if self-regulation is seen as effective, it can provoke uneasiness about ‘privatised censorship’ where responsibility for fundamental rights is handed over to private actors, many of which are centres of power in society.1 The purpose of this chapter is to place the results of research on self-regulation across media industries in the wider context of freedom-of-expression concerns. The goal is to identify areas of conflict between the activities of self-regulatory bodies and freedom-of-expression rights, in order to understand the implications for freedom of expression of the restrictions on the content of speech that originate in the actions of those self-regulatory bodies.
