Why big business should always support press freedom

If press freedom was really bad for business interests then it would never have lasted in the United States. Openness and transparency ultimately aids price discovery and raises market valuations. Hence it has survived despite some appalling market ups and downs over the past two hundred years.

In Roman times emperors occasionally shot the messengers. The poor chap bringing the bad news took the blame. But did the messenger create the bad news? And did shooting him actually change anything?

Indeed, shooting the messenger actually made things worse. Without the best information, and perhaps the intelligence from quizzing the messenger, how can leaders make the best decisions?

Inaccurate reporting

In our current times it is tempting to turn on the inaccurate and often preposterous articles printed about Dubai in the UK media recently. Not much in these reports has more than a grain of truth, and the extrapolations by journalists largely ignorant of the UAE are nonsense.

However, the correct response is a vigilant defense of Dubai, not some kind of a retreat into a moody silence, and there have been plenty of vocal comments from the Dubai media about the market reality.

Yet hiding information creates false markets. In fact the very suspicion it creates undermines market valuations of businesses, for example. For if you can not trust the data given about a company you value it less.

That is why over time in advanced countries the press has become more free: it is actually in the interests of big business to support press freedom. If that were not the case then, perhaps a little cynically, it is hard to see how it would have been sustained until now.

The attacks on press freedom usually come when leaders have made serious mistakes that they not only do not want to acknowledge but which perhaps they do not yet understand. Stifling all criticism will actually only make things worse, of course, as their errors will be compounded.

Press bias

At the end of the day a free press may be irritating and very annoying on occasions. It may publish false as well as true information. But that is a very great deal better than only hearing one side of the story.

A responsible media, guarded by laws to protect individuals and companies from slander and libel, should nonetheless be free to print what its careful research shows to be the truth, however unpalatable it might be at the time. It is a critical safeguard to business interests and capital valuations in a free market.