The Right To Tell--The Role Of Mass Media In Economic Development

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Press Release: Free and Independent Media
Empower the Poor and Spur Development

PROCEEDINGS

 MS. ANSTEY:  Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.  Thank you very much for coming to this press conference to launch the publication, "The Right to Tell," which is a World Bank publication.

 I am joined by a distinguished couple of colleagues here on the podium.  To my left, of course, is Joe Stiglitz, the distinguished Nobel Laureate and now Professor of Finance and Business at Columbia University and our former Chief Economist at the World Bank, and contributor to this book.

 To his left is Roumeen Islam, who is a Senior Manager at the World Bank Institute and was the team leader of the World  Development Report 2002, Building Institutions for Markets, from which this publication is a spinoff.

 I hope you have all had a chance to look at the book.  There are copies outside.

 So, without further ado, let me ask Roumeen to say a few opening words, and then she will hand over to Joe.

 Roumeen?

 MS. ISLAM:  Thank you.

 Good morning.  I am very pleased to be talking today about a subject that is close to both your hearts and mine--the power of information.

 The "Right to Tell" is about this power.  It tells about the importance of information and particularly the media in the development process.

 The key message is that an independent media can boost economic development by promoting good governance and empowering citizens.  It can make economies function better.

 There are many examples of this around the world.  In Colombia, for example, a couple of years ago, a local TV station broadcast a video that showed a corrupt public official bribing an opposition Member of Congress.  Others reported that he was smuggling arms to Colombian guerrillas, and he was soon dismissed.

 There are empirical studies that show how public health efforts can be improved. Women's access to the media has been associated with better health and fertility outcomes even after accounting for income and education levels.

 As Caroline mentioned, this book is a natural sequel to the World Development Report 2002, Building Institutions for Markets, where we first looked at the role that the media played in development.

 Increasingly, the work of governments, international organizations, communities, and citizens around the world is geared toward promoting transparency.  Information or transparency is an essential ingredient of any initiative designed to enhance the accountability of economic and political actors.

 So this book addresses what the media industry can do, how it does it, and what are the conditions necessary for it to do it well.  It speaks to the unique role that the media industry can play in two spheres.  First, in enabling critical stakeholders to monitor and reward or punish accordingly the actions of government, private citizens and firms.  The media's role in the Enron case is a striking example.

 Second, it enhances the ability of poor and disenfranchised members of society to make their voices heard.  David Stromberg, from the Institute for International Economics in Sweden, talks in his book about how people in rural America gained from the advent of the radio in the early 1900s.  The radio informed people in rural areas of the issues; they were no longer isolated.  And they voted accordingly, getting more public funds to be devoted to these areas.

 He says that politicians have a greater incentive to provide public goods benefitting a certain group if they can get credit for doing so.

 These are things the media can do.

 The book discusses how the industry does this, specifically in two main ways--first, by providing information that allows people to make better decisions, to evaluate the processes by which decisions by others are made, and to judge economic and social outcomes; and second, by affecting the reputation of key individuals.

 People care about their reputations, and media attention can provide strong incentives for changing behavior.

 Reputational penalties and rewards can be powerful in ensuring accountability toward constituents.

 Greater transparency supported by the media can convince people to follow rules and laws set down by government, but it can do much more.  It can ensure that people behave in socially responsible ways even in the absence of laws or when laws are weak and unenforceable.

 Alexander Dyck from Harvard University and Luigi Zingales from the University of Chicago give some interesting examples of how corporate managers' actions have been influenced by the press in this manner, both in developed and developing countries.

 The "Right to Tell" also discusses particular conditions under which the media industry supports better governance and pro-development outcomes.

 To do its job well, the industry needs to be independent, produce reliable and high-quality output, and have sufficient outreach.

 By "independent" media, I mean media who are not unduly influenced or captured by government or particular interest groups in the private sector.

 Of course, there is an undeniable symbiotic relationship between media, government, and business. This is evident if one considers that media survival depends on its net revenue, which comes not just from consumers of news, but which is dependent on advertising revenues, on government subsidies, fees, or taxes.  And moreover, the regulatory environment in which it operates is determined by government.

 How independent the industry is affects its quality.  More independent media tend to produce more reliable and better analysis. 

 Of course, quality is also affected by training and by the sources of checks and balances on the media itself.

 By "outreach," I mean who has access to the news produced by the media. 

 Independence, quality, and reach depend on a number of things that are policy-related--that is, they are in government hands.  This book discusses these at length.  I am going to split them into two groups.  I will label the first group "the general economic situation and structure," and by this, I mean a diverse set of evidence such as who owns the media, who owns private firms, industrial structure, and the degree of competition in the economy, economic growth, policies toward infrastructure and education.

 It is clear why some of these things matter.  Where there is no electricity, there is little likelihood of having television; and where people cannot read or write, the written press will not have as much effect as the radio broadcasts.

 If you go to any village in Bangladesh, where I was born, you will see people gathered around the radio--not that every family will have one, but friends and neighbors do, and they share the radio. And of course, their local marketplace will have a radio transmitting all kinds of information.

 In the second group, I would put the legal and regulatory system affecting information disclosure and use.  Freedom of information laws and insult laws are two examples.

 The first one affects how much access to information the industry has; the second one affects what journalists write.

 Whether insult laws exist and how often they are invoked affects how journalists use the information they obtain.  Other examples are rules and laws that apply to private companies, such as disclosure laws.  If economic actors are not required to disclose information, then a free media will have a very difficult time providing reliable information to the public.

 These issues are all discussed in the book.

 So, to reiterate, the purpose of the book is to highlight the role of the media industry in the development process to bring to the attention of communities and policymakers around the world that the media industry can support their search for better governance and empower the poor, and, to go one step further, to bring to their attention the type of policy and regulations which are needed to enhance transparency and enable the media to support good governance and development.

 I would like to end with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, a leader who used the British press to cover the conditions in colonial India in a manner that aroused politicians in Britain, across the ocean, to change their attitudes and improve governance in India.

 He said:  "One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand the popular feeling and give expression to it.  Another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments.  The third is fearlessly to expose defects."

 Thank you.

 MS. ANSTEY:  Thank you, Roumeen.

 That's a wonderful segue, to Joe.

 MR. STIGLITZ:  Thank you very much.  It's a real pleasure to be here.

 This book represents an example of a broader investigation that has been undertaken by the World Bank and the development community more broadly between what might be called political processes and economic outcomes.

 One of the thrusts of work in the World Bank over the last 6 years has been, for instance, on the relationship between corruption and economic growth.  Corruption used to be something that was viewed as a political process, and now we view it as well as part of economics.

 Similarly, there is work that has been done on the relationship between democracy and economic outcomes.  Amartya Sen, who is a Nobel Prize winner, has focused on the fact that you do not see famines in countries in which there are democracies, largely because the role that the press plays in exposing what is going on--it is not the shortage of food, but it is the distribution of food that gives rise to famines.

 The issue of transparency, the issue of information, in a way can to development at least dramatically in the context of the East Asia crisis just 5 years ago, where everybody talked about the importance of transparency, openness--lack of transparency as at the core of the problem.

 But the full ramifications of this search for more openness, the search for the consequences of better information, has only been slow in coming out, partly because there has been resistance to this.  There has been a gap between the rhetoric and the reality.

 For instance, while the U.S. Government  was at the forefront of talking about the problems of lack of transparency in East Asia, it was much less enthusiastic about the notion of doing anything about the offshore banking centers.  That was, of course, before September 11.  After September 11, it was recognized that these offshore banking centers were a source of funding for the terrorists.

 But it is a development issue--it is not just a terrorist issue--because these offshore secret bank accounts fund corruption, are the vehicle through which corruption occurs and through which the fruits of corruption are taken from developing countries and in that sense impeded their development efforts.

 As another example of the importance of transparency, there is the recent initiative of BP to disclose in Angola its payments to the Angolan Government for oil.  It is another example of transparency which has not been met well by most of the other oil companies.

 The point of all this is that these issues of openness and transparency are, I think, now being recognized as central to the development effort, and the media played an absolutely essential role in disseminating this information.

 I want to turn now to a second issue which is setting this book in a broader theoretical context.  As some of you may know, my own work for which I got the Nobel Prize was related to the consequences of asymmetries of information for economic processes.

 But asymmetries of information are particularly important in development, and they are also very important in the context of political processes.  There are asymmetries of information between the governors and those whom they govern, between the government and those whom they are supposed to serve.

 One of the major thrusts of the work on asymmetries of information in economics was that when you have these large asymmetries, those who are entrusted to act on behalf of others often do not do what they are supposed to do.  And we have seen that very dramatically in the context of the corporate scandals that have plagued the United States and other countries.

 But it is exactly the same asymmetric information which gives rise to political problems as well, where those who are supposed to act, the political leaders who are supposed to act on behalf of the citizens, often do not do what they are supposed to do in behalf.  Rather, they act in their own interest, just as the corporate leaders acted in their own interest.

 So there is really a parallel here.  And the resolution--the partial resolution; there is no complete resolution--is also parallel.  It is information--disclosure of information, dissemination of information, reducing the asymmetries of information.

 The book focuses on two aspects of these attempts to reduce the asymmetries of information.  It focuses on the right to know and the right to tell.  And at one point, there was actually a discussion about what was the right title--the "Right to Know" or the "Right to Tell"--and obviously, both of these are really parallel and really both essential ingredients.

 You cannot have a functioning democracy without the right to know.  If the citizens don't know what it is that their government is doing, you don't have a functioning democracy.

 These issues have long been of concern, but have sometimes been swept under the rug.  It was only with the Watergate scandal in the United States 25 years ago that the right to know got embedded in legislation in the Freedom of Information Act.  And I think all of us who have been involved in trying to understand what is going on in the public sector have come to appreciate the importance of the Freedom of Information Act.

 There are obviously limitations, particularly in areas of national security.  But there is a very important book that I would like to commend to you, which is a book by Senator Moynihan called "Secrecy" in which he argues that in fact the Cold War would have proceeded quite differently and much better had there been less secrecy and more openness; that the greater pursuit of the right to know would have led to better outcomes.

 But of course, the broader issue is the right to tell--not only for the press to know what is going on but to tell that, disseminate that information.

 And the core of the book, which Roumeen has described very well, is what makes for an effective media, what makes for effective mechanisms for the right to tell.

 I'm not going to repeat what she said, and I think the last quotation from Gandhi is very apropos.  Obviously, one of the things for an effective media is the access to information that is embodied in the basic principle of the right to know, and the book documents the spread of the right to know laws as well as the problems of  implementation of those laws.

 But I want to call attention to perhaps three aspects of what makes for an effective media.  One of them is media diversity.  We all understand the importance of competition policy to make sure that prices are low and that markets work in the way that they are supposed to work.  Without competition, markets don't do what they are supposed to do.  Underlying Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is the belief in competition.

 One of the results of the economics of imperfect information was to argue that quite often, the markets are not highly competitive, even when there are many members of the industry, that the extent of competition is often limited.

 But in the area of media, the argument for competition and diversity is even stronger, because it is not just a worry about whether there are excess profits where the price is above marginal cost.  What is at issue is the functioning of democracy, the transmission of information to the governed.

 And here, what is important is not only competition but diversity.  And the book discusses in an important way the role of state ownership and private ownership.  In some of what went on in the economies in transition, there was insufficient attention paid to either competition or diversity in the media, particularly in core media like TV.

 In Russia, there were two private TV stations created, but they were given to oligarchs, and many people in Russia felt what difference did it make--before, they had state-controlled news; now, they had oligarch-controlled news.  And when the state decided to shut down the oligarchs, the loss was less than many people in the west would have expected, partly because nobody trusted the news coming out of the oligarchs much more than they trusted the news coming out of the state.

 So you need diversity and independence, and what constitutes independence is actually a very hard, very subtle issue.

 And related to that is the second point I want to emphasize, which is giving voice to the poor.  In the World Development Report of 2000, we talked about poverty--the World Bank talked about poverty--and it talked about the many dimensions of poverty, not just loss of income, but insecurity and a sense of voicelessness.

 In many countries, there may be competitive press, but all of the press represents establishment interests, and the poor are not represented.  So there is no voice for the poor.

 So effective development giving rise to the concerns of the poor requires some forms of media that pay attention to what I view as a central issue.

 The third issue that the book draws attention to are the legal frameworks.  Roumeen has mentioned that a little bit.  In many countries, libel laws are used to shut down the press, and the standards for libel are sufficiently high that if you say anything negative about the government, it is interpreted as libel.  So you have, quote, "freedom of the press," but the freedom of the press is so circumscribed by the legal framework that you don't have freedom of the press.

 So you cannot separate the legal framework, which includes libel laws, from the other ingredients that make for an effective media.

 Let me just say in conclusion that I think this is a very important book because it articulates the importance of the right to tell and the right to know for not only development but for democratic development and I think in the long run for equitable development.

 Thank you.

 MS. ANSTEY:  Thank you very much, Joe.

 Before I throw it open to questions, let me just remind you that this press conference and the report is embargoed until 2 o'clock this afternoon.

 So, please, it's open to questions now.  And if you could state your name and media outlet, we will be doing a transcript and posting it on our website, and it helps for that purpose.

 Yes, sir, at the back.

 QUESTION:  I am Richard Finney [phonetic] with Radio Free Asia.

 Has the World Bank had any experiences in Vietnam that you could point to as examples of where an un-free press has caused development projects to fail?

 MS. ISLAM:  Actually, what I'd like to say in terms of pointing to whether the press can be pointed to as the only thing that affects development outcomes or not--it's a really difficult thing to disentangle the effect of the press from other things in terms of its magnitude.  So I'm going to say that, generally speaking, if you ask me if a country is tighter on the press, can I say that its overall development--that it will develop less equitably and perhaps less fast than other countries--I will say yes.  And I can also give you examples of how, when you have--as I did when I was speaking--a press that even may not be--there are many definitions of "freedom," and even when it is somewhat free, it can report on issues such as bribery and corruption and therefore lead to better development outcomes.  So obviously, if you even shut that down, then it would lead to poorer development outcomes.

 MR. STIGLITZ:  Let me just say, without commenting on particular countries, that the international press has played an important role.  There are examples where, even in countries that are not as free as one would like, the international press has had access to the countries, has written stories that have been published by, for instance, the Asian Wall Street Journal, that have had impacts on what goes on inside those countries.  Governments read those international newspapers and feel pressure when those stories get discussed.

 So there are examples that one can cite in almost every country where particular projects have been exposed as a result of press scrutiny, either domestically or internationally.

 MS. ANSTEY:  Yes, sir, in the front here.

 Do we have a microphone?

 QUESTION:  No.  It's okay.  I'll try to speak up.

 My name is Andre Sitov [phonetic], with the ITAR-TASS Agency.

 In a way, this book represents sort of wishful thinking, and in that sense, this is a  press conference, and we are the press, so you are preaching to the converted.  We know; we agree.

 The question is--you mentioned, sir, for instance, that both the government and the corporate sector have institutional interests in keeping the secrets. So how do we, or how do you, make them overcome that suspicion of the press, and how do you make them believe that it is in their interest to open up, to act more transparently, aside, again, from the generalized calls for it?

 As an example, just as an example, maybe it could be somehow worked into the conditionality of the IFIs working around the world--but I don't see how.

 MS. ISLAM:  There are two points that I'd like to make here.  First of all, the World Bank is both a knowledge institution and a lending institution, and I myself currently work in the capacity-building arm of the World Bank.  And in fact, there, we reach out not just to governments and the press, but to many other stakeholders--to citizens, to NGOs, to communities, to other international organizations.  And our job is to actually inform countries, in their move toward greater transparency--because I think everyone is recognizing that information flow is good for economic development--our job is actually to point out what are the areas where you could develop to promote this transparency.  So we are speaking first to a wide audience.

 And development is not just in the hands of government or international organizations; it is in the hands of all the people.  And we speak not just to journalists, as you mentioned, but to all the people.  So I would like to pose it that we can have an effect that way.

 And in terms of conditionality, as I said, we are also a knowledge institution, and the World Bank is moving away from conditionality or to want ownership in the countries for the programs that they undertake.  And we also are working in ways that are very complementary to the media itself.  We are constantly talking in our different projects about the importance of transparency in terms of just getting economic data and publishing economic data.  Many countries--we are surprised--actually want to do more on this, and they just don't have the capacity to.

 So there are many projects that are actually linked to this.

 MR. STIGLITZ:  Let me say that it is good to be giving a talk to a friendly audience, and it is always easier preaching to the converted--but there is an important role for analytic arguments, for trying to make the case stronger for greater openness.  And in a way, that is what this book is about.  It is trying to do a deep analysis into a whole wide set of areas, from corporate governance to the public sector, and trying to explain through examples in different countries and through analysis why it is that openness, the right to know, the right to tell, is an important developmental issue--it is a developmental issue as well as a political issue.

 Let me give you just one example of how the analysis of the book might lead to a greater understanding.  It tries to expose what are the incentives for secrecy.  In the chapter I wrote, I discuss secrecy in the language that economists typically use, which is "an artificially-created scarcity."

 Economists are all against artificially- created scarcities.  Everybody is against artificially-created scarcities.  But this is an artificially-created scarcity of information, knowledge.  That is what secrecy is.

 One of the things that economists always do is talk about what are the consequences of artificially-created scarcities.  They give rise to rents.  And rents give rise to corruption.

 Well, an artificially-created scarcity of knowledge gives rise to rents, knowledge rents.  And those knowledge rents can be and are frequently used as a source of corruption.

 So by understanding the processes, the incentives for the creation of scarcity, the consequences of scarcity, in greater depth, one is, I think, better armed to start looking for it and attacking it.

 So it is really meant to be sort of a toolkit to help you--those of you who are committed to greater openness--to help you in the battle for greater openness and transparency.

 MS. ANSTEY:  I am just going to add two very quick things to what Joe said.  I think it is important to reiterate something that he said at the beginning, namely, that 6 years ago, the Bank didn't talk about corruption because it was widely believed that corruption was a political issue, not an economic issue, and the Bank is not allowed to get involved, by virtue of its Articles of Agreement, in political issues.

 But we said, then, working with Joe and others, that corruption is actually an economic issue; it is a very profound economic issue, and it is a legitimate area for the Bank to be involved in.  And of course, now it is very central.

 What we are saying here is we are doing the same thing with the free press.  We are saying a free press is not a political issue; it is an economic issue and a social issue and a development issue, and as such, it is a legitimate area for the Bank to be looking at, to be examining in the way Joe and Roumeen have done. And it is also an area for Bank activity.  The Bank, in Roumeen's group, is now training some 1,000 journalists in investigative reporting, and it is doing that for the pure reason--we have workshops with African journalists and others--that that will increase their capacity to throw a spotlight on corruption in their own countries.  And we have a very vigorous training program of journalists in investigative journalism--another area which people might have thought was off-limits for the Bank because it is too political.  And as I said, we have redefined this as an economic issue.

 Yes, sir, in the middle here, in the second row.

 QUESTION:  L.K. Sharma of the Deccan Herald. Let me be a little unfriendly now.  In many of the trends which have of late gathered momentum, I do not have the academic data, but on the basis of any total evidence, it is very apparent that the kind of thought which we are having in this becomes a little bit unrealistic, because even in the countries where media used to be serving the purpose of spurring development has gone the way of the dominant Western model of tabloidization [phonetic].  Serious newspapers have gone the way where readers are being told about statistics, rather than the issues which my friend Amartya Sen highlighted, that because it highlights famine, hunger, government takes corrective action. 

 So the aspects which have become very important are the kind of character which it has developed and the nature of ownership.  These two factors I don't not think, if we take into account, there will be anything very positive to say.

 Secondly--now, this is only a kind of cynical view--but when you talk about corruption and development, maybe one day you will examine that there is a close linkage, but linkage which [inaudible]--unless we say that the corruption unleashes the kinds of forces which spur development, you will not be able to take the entire picture.

 There are two aspects.  Let me explain.  One is that dynamism and corruption tend to go together in many societies; and secondly, that the corruption-and-development relationship cannot be examined without letting it be known that it is only the corrupt society which unleashes the models which spur development.  This is slightly off the main subject, but I thought that since you referred to this, I would talk about this, too.

 You must have been aware of the great economist in India who said "Hindu rate of growth."  Now, there were issues of development and aspiration models which are now being unleashed by the Western media or even the Indian media, as a result of which every poor family would like to have a color TV.  So, would you like to examine this relationship between corruption and development?

 MR. STIGLITZ:  First, let me say on the first question, on the fact that in many countries, there is not a diversity of viewpoint, I think that is a source of concern.  That was one of the things that I highlighted.

 I think one of the issues that countries ought to be addressing is how can they ensure that there is a greater diversity of perspective that is being expressed.  That may take the form--some of the technological advances have meant that the cost of having a radio station has come way down, so you may be able to use different forms of media to have low-cost delivery mechanisms of ideas.

 And there is in some countries a recognition that the government may have to support a variety of what you might call "people's radio stations" to promote a broader diversity of viewpoints.  And in my own mind, that might be a very effective way of spending public money to enhance democratic discourse.

 I think that an active media should be very critical, including critical of itself, and aware of the lack of diversity.  And there are in the United States, for instance, a couple of foundations that have been studying--have been very explicit in trying to study--the news coverage and the balance of that news coverage and how it changes.  And I think that kind of process of analysis of news coverage is very important as almost an academic but more than an academic study to be aware of--to have monitoring of the degree of diversity and representativeness of the news.

 On the second, I am less sympathetic about the use of corruption as a development mechanism.  There was one government official who a number of years ago once told me--he was a little bit concerned whether he had been too strong in rooting our corruption--and he said, "Well, maybe corruption is necessary to grease the wheels of society."

 In retrospect, I think it turns out that it greases some wheels better than others, and it overall does not serve development well.

 But there is a large research program at the World Bank Institute that has been looking at the many facets of corruption, and some forms of corruption are worse than others--there is absolutely no doubt about that--and some of the World Bank studies have tried to identify those forms of corruption which are worse than others and which, therefore, greater attention ought to be addressed to try to attack those forms of corruption.

 QUESTION:  But can you comment more on the first question?  I think basically, the issue of whether in the last few years, the kinds of objectives which you have, like diversity, development through journalism--has all this sort of gone further ahead, or have they regressed?

 MS. ANSTEY:  Joe, very quickly, because there are a number of other people who want to ask questions.

 MR. STIGLITZ:  I have not done a detailed study of various countries to know.  I do know that there are some alternative forces going on in different directions, and the net weight of that is hard to assess, but I do think it is something that one should be worried about.

 But on the one hand, there has been in a number of countries increased media concentration, and that obviously reduces the degree of diversity; and there has been insufficient--even though legal frameworks have been weakened, I think--even in the United States, there is less concern about media concentration than there was in the past, and for me, this is a serious concern.

 On the other hand, technology has changed in ways that, in some countries, there is easier access to a whole variety of information.  In the United States, for instance, the internet has provided access to information in a way that was not available before.  That is not true in many developing countries, because they don't have the resources.  And that is one of the major differences between developing and developed countries, that some of the things of diversity of access to information that we have in the advanced industrial countries are not accessible in less-developed countries.  And that is why I think these issues are of even greater concern there.

 MS. ANSTEY:  Thank you.

 Yes, ma'am, right in the back.

 QUESTION:  Priscilla Huff, with Common Ground Radio.

 The first question is a question of investment.  Whose responsibility is it--because journalism obviously costs money; we all like to be paid--whose responsibility is it to increase the outlets and the infrastructure to get the reporting out there?

 The second question is about journalism education.  Whose responsibility is it to teach the aspiring journalists of the world news judgment and how to write the questions, how to ask the questions and how to write the stories so people get the information?

 MS. ISLAM:  In terms of outlets and in terms of infrastructure, obviously, the responsibility of government, whether it owns or regulates private infrastructure investment, it plays a very big role in it--whether it is an economy that is dominated by private telecommunications or public, they determine where the outlets are.

 In terms of journalism education, I would say there is a diverse set of people in whose hands this could be.  Journalists themselves is one set of actors, but there are general educators as well.  At the World Bank Institute, for example, where we train journalists, we are not all journalists ourselves.  Some of our trainers are.  But generally, we also give things like basic economics training, basic civics training, business management training, and that, anybody can actually give.

 But generally from the private sector, I would hate to think that I would be saying, "Governments, go out and train your journalists."

 MR. STIGLITZ:  If I could just make a couple of points quickly.  First of all, one of the important forms of media particularly today is TV and radio, and the use of the spectrum--the spectrum is a public good that we have in all countries in one way or another privatized.  But as we privatize it--that is, give the use of the spectrum to private broadcasters--we should do it in a way that is consistent with the public interest.  I think the public service obligations that are associated with the use of spectrum are a legitimate and important use of public responsibility.

 So that the way the spectrum is managed, it should be managed in ways that are consonant with the kinds of objectives that I just talked about as well as broader democratic objectives, including campaign issues.

 The second point I want to make is that the private media inevitably require, as people say, a business plan.  As we saw with the dot-coms, many of them didn't have a business plan, and the private media require advertising.

 In most of the advanced industrial countries, there is a sensitivity of the separation between the business side of the media, the news side, and the editorial side.  Those walls are sometimes not as high as they ought to be, and I think it is important for the media to try to monitor the existence of those walls, because when they aren't there, obviously, the confidence in the news reporting and the diversity of the news reporting can be very adversely affected.  And I think this is a matter of, I would say, basic ethics.

 Finally, in terms of education, I think the model that has evolved in many countries around the world, which is a mix of public-private, is an appropriate one.

 Knowledge is a public good.  It is one of the things that economists have stressed in recent years.  It is one of the reasons why knowledge is such an important part of the World Bank today.  It is a kind of global public good.  And the knowledge about news reporting is a kind of knowledge.  Training and education is an important responsibility of government.

 But because of the key role that this plays in democracy, I think it is very important for that role to be played not only by government but by the private sector.  You have to have a check and balance. 

 And I think the kind of mixed system where you have an important role for education that goes on in universities, like Columbia in its School of Journalism--and we actually conduct programs in journalism not only in the journalism school but also, I am involved in something called the Initiative for Policy Dialogue in the School of International and Public Affairs--it has become a very important core part of the university as a whole.

 MS. ANSTEY:  Thank you.

 Yes, sir?

 QUESTION:  Al Milliken [phonetic], Washington Independent Writers.

 Do any of you have further comment on what is in your book on page 70, where Edward S. Herman mentions the New York Times and the mainstream media justifying excluding Ralph Nader from the national debate with George W. Bush and Al Gore.  The book in Chapter 4 mentions the New York Times editorial that explained that "The two major parties reflected all the options the public needed, and the Times passed judgment that Nader did not need to run because the two parties offered a clearcut choice, so there was no driving logic for a third party candidacy this year."

 Is this an example of media falsely mistaking its role for that of God, and does that show some serious irresponsibility?

 MS. ANSTEY:  Joe, I think that's question for you.

 MR. STIGLITZ:  Well, my view is very strongly the importance of diversity.  I think that there are some very difficult decisions that have to be made in framing, say, the national debates, because if there are two dominant parties, you want--there is a scarcity of time; it is a resource.

 On the other hand, I think it is absolutely essential for there to be mechanisms for getting out diverse viewpoints, and how you compromise that is a difficult question.  The notion that you just described, that the two parties represent all the relevant views, I find a very strange one.  We all know that there is a lot of diversity within the parties and that, as you go into an election, that diversity tends to be reduced because people want to concentrate on the core platform.  But it is important for other views to be brought into the political process.

 MS. ANSTEY:  Thank you.

 Yes, in the front here.

 QUESTION:  This is not a political question, as you raised the question of corruption, but it is a development question.  After September 11 and this ongoing quote-unquote war on terrorism, how do you think, Mr. Stiglitz, this is going to affect the right to tell and the right to know?

 MR. STIGLITZ:  Well, that's a very good and very important question that we don't talk about in the book.  I think there are many of us who are very concerned about the manner in which access to information may be circumscribed.

 Every right to know and right to tell is going to be circumscribed.  We all know that there are legitimate limitations.  You don't, for instance--if a government regulator discovers that a bank is about to fail or is in a precarious position, it isn't going to announce that to the world, because if it does, it will surely lead to failure when there is some chance that it might have recovered.

 We also know that the right to know and right to tell is circumscribed by rights of privacy.  And in fact the book describes in some sense some of these limitations.

 National security has long been an example of one of the areas in which the right to know and right to tell has been circumscribed.

 The question is to what extent is it circumscribed and to what extent as it gets circumscribed does that right as well as other rights of basic civil liberties get injured.

 The reason I made a reference before to Senator Moynihan's book on secrecy was that he explicitly addressed the issue of national security and secrecy, and in that context, he presents an overwhelming case that secrecy harmed national security, that there wasn't a tradeoff of rights versus national security, that it was actually the case that probably secrecy harmed national security, looked at from a broader perspective.

 I think there is precisely that kind of concern today.

 The risks of undermining democracy--in a way, the war on terrorism is often viewed as a war for American values and broader values that are held all over the world, values about democracy, civil rights.  And the real worry is that in the fight against terrorism, we may have lost that war by giving up some of those basic rights.

 So the hard issue is how you balance them and whether we are balanced in the right way right now, and whether we are having the kind of democratic discussion about balancing that we ought to have as part of a vibrant democracy.

 MS. ANSTEY:  Thank you.

 The gentleman standing in the back.  I think we're going to have to make this the last question.  We have been here for an hour now.

 QUESTION:  Barry Wood, Voice of America.

 I want to pursue the value question that was raised by the gentleman from India, because if we go back to communism, there was a way of looking at the world, and there was a way of looking at the world as, as he mentioned, "Hindu rate of growth."  You mentioned the Columbia School of Journalism.

 There is a danger, I suppose, that this publication is seen as a kind of Washington consensus document, that there is one way of looking at information and that these values are the ones that should be promulgated.

 How do you address diversity in a world in which there seems to be one standard way of looking at things in the wake of the collapse of certain ideologies?

 MS. ISLAM:  Actually, the book says quite clearly at the end of the first chapter that it is up to the people to decide how much information they want, and if they want information, it is up to them to decide to fight for it.  No one can say from above--we, the World Bank, or any other institution--it is our job to let people know, let stakeholders know, how important is information to economic development.  But how much information there actually is in a given country cannot be taken in isolation of what the people want for their given country.

 MR. STIGLITZ:  Let me put it in the following way.  I would be more concerned with what you ask if we had any power to impose anything.  What we are doing is expressing the views of these authors, and it is a collection of papers, each of which has an author, that represents their assessment of the knowledge in this area, the knowledge of the consequences of better information, better extension of the right to know, more extensive extension of the right to tell.

 It is information that I hope, and I think many of us hope, will lead people to say, yes, these are things that ought to change in this way--we ought to have more media diversity, we ought to have a stronger right to know law, a stronger right to tell--and if we do that, that will facilitate faster development, more equitable development, more democratic development.

 But others can disagree with this, and then we will have a debate over that issue.  And I think that is all that we can say.  This does not represent a consensus document, and it is not representing a conditionality.  It is a statement of what we believe to be the knowledge about the role of knowledge.

 MS. ANSTEY:  Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

 [Whereupon, at 12:01 p.m., the press conference was concluded.]