From the UN to the EU, from the US Bill of Rights to the Irish Constitution, freedom of the press has been held up as a fundamental value whenever it comes time to enshrine certain human rights. However, the fact that most people and institutions agree, at least in public, on the value of a free press doesn't mean that journalists actually operate without restriction all over the world.
In fact, there are all sorts of forces that operate against press freedom, some of them very hard to pin down - and even harder to combat.
Even "freedom-loving" governments reserve the right to control and censor some elements of the media - not just pornographic or violent "entertainment", but news and political opinion too. In the US, just a few years after its Bill of Rights was enshrined in the late 1700s, the government was busy cracking down on publications containing ideas it regarded as "alien" and "seditious".
Most governments practice some form of censorship when their countries are at war. And it doesn't have to be a full-scale, declared war: for most of the period of the recent Troubles here in Ireland, the Republic's government prohibited broadcasters from transmitting interviews with members of the IRA or Sinn Fein. RTE took this to mean all interviews, even if the potential interviewee was just a Sinn Fein councillor trying to talk about a local issue. (British broadcasters faced similar restrictions in the latter years of the conflict.)
There are other, perfectly legal, ways that press freedom is restricted, often when it comes into potential conflict with other rights.
Here in Ireland, for example, the libel laws take an individual's right to his or her reputation very seriously, and media outlets can face crippling court pay-outs if they publish a story that may well be true, but can't be proven in a court of law.
A defendant's right to a fair trial is paramount, and publications can be held in contempt of court if they appear to jeopardise that right.
Did you ever wonder why you rarely read anything much about even the most notorious crime between the time that a person is accused of the crime and such time as there is a verdict in a trial?
Under what's known as the sub judice rule, journalists can get in a lot of trouble if they seem to be interfering or trying to do the job of the courts. (They can also get in trouble if they question how well the courts are doing their job).
Many countries, including Ireland, have incitement-to-hatred laws. These can mean prosecution for someone who publishes something that could encourage violence or hatred against, for example, members of a minority group. In Germany, the law is particularly strict and vigorously enforced against neo-Nazi material.
And, of course, to exercise freedom of the press you have to own a press in the first place! (Or a radio station, or a TV transmitter, or, nowadays, the technical equipment, cash, time and know-how to start and maintain a website.)
The owners and controllers of media outlets aren't always interested in giving their journalists the maximum possible freedom: maybe they're over-cautious about the libel laws; maybe they have their own political friends or commercial interests that they don't want bothered; maybe they have moral or ethical qualms about some sorts of journalism; or maybe they just don't like a particular set of views or type of story and don't want to see it reflected in their newspapers or broadcasts.
Just as in other professions, there are many journalists who don't get jobs, don't get stories published or don't make progress in their workplaces simply because their faces don't fit.
Journalism may like to portray itself as a higher moral calling - and many journalists do indeed work to consistently high standards of integrity and fairness - but that certainly doesn't mean newspapers and broadcasters are immune to petty office politics.
All these sorts of restrictions can be frustrating for journalists in the western world who are trying to tell stories they think are in the public interest. However, they pale into insignificance compared to the struggles of many journalists for their fundamental freedoms, and even their lives, mainly in developing countries.
If you look at the maps showing where journalists were killed last year and where they are incarcerated, you'll see that the bloody dots are overwhelmingly, and the prison bars exclusively, outside the "Western democracies". (The two exceptions are a Spanish journalist, Jose Luis Lopez de la Calle, killed by the Basque separatist group ETA, of which he was highly critical in print; and James Edwin Richards, an online editor killed by local Los Angeles criminals, perhaps because of his reporting of their activities.)
World Press Freedom Day, which is celebrated tomorrow, is actually an initiative from the developing world. On May 3rd, 1991, 10 years ago, a group of African journalists issued the Declaration of Windhoek, which called for free, independent and pluralistic media on that continent and throughout the world.
In developing countries - including the former Soviet states of eastern Europe - newspapers, news agencies and broadcasters have often been in the hands of state authorities, who obviously have their own reasons to want to restrict free reporting. But even when the media pass into private hands, as they have done in many countries, journalists often find they are doubly unfree - restricted by the state and by their new owners. In many countries, too, economic conditions have made it very difficult to build private media enterprises.
The fact that so many journalists are still willing to take risks - to report on war, conflict, crime, poverty, economic exploitation, drug-trafficking and other stories that someone would rather remain untold testifies to the fact that a free press is important enough to kill for, and to die for.
