There Is No Right To Know

Those who laud the public's "right" to know either do not understand what it would really mean for the public to "know" or what it would really mean to impose such a right on America's commercial media. The reality of the mass advertising marketplace is simply:

THERE IS NO RIGHT TO KNOW.

The right to know is a notion of the public's constitutional guarantee to a full and unfettered measure of information­quantitatively and qualitatively sufficient to promote rational decisionmaking in all matters, political, economic, and otherwise. This right is inextricably tied to both the rationality model of the marketplace of ideas and the political model of participatory governance. ²¹⁷ In fact, such a right was collaterally touted as a justification for First Amendment freedom in Virginia Pharmacy, ²¹⁸ a case championing the informational function of commercial expression. ²¹⁹ For these reasons, the right cannot be honored in a highly commercial culture where image is all, where truth is irrelevant, and where citizen­democracy is eclipsed by consumer­democracy. This is but another way of saying that the right to know cannot coexist easily with commercial mass advertising.

Moreover, to impose a public's right to know on the media would challenge the freedoms from governmental interference that the American commercial press has long enjoyed. Charting a direction never followed by the Supreme Court, Justice William O. Douglas perceived a necessary connection between the public's right to know and any First Amendment protection of press liberties: "The press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme, not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class, but to bring fulfillment to the public's right to know." ²²⁰ Indeed, if the Douglas perspective were given full force, the First Amendment would place a sword in the hands of the public to be used against any commercial media that did not vindicate its right to know. Such a scenario is particularly problematic in the context of America's economic realities: The commercial media, as we know them, would be hard­pressed to survive in our capitalistic society if they could not be  heavily subsidized by the message­making machine of mass advertising. ²²¹

It is no surprise, then, that the Douglas dissent stands as a romantic aberration in a culture captured by commerce. The public's right to know could never be more than what it has become­an idle slogan. ²²² Even as a slogan, it is at war ideologically with a system that permits advertisers to influence and dictate editorial content and that allows uninhibited consumer reporting to succumb to advertiser­friendly copy. In such a system, the public hears everything that advertisers want them to hear and relatively little that they don't.

Ultimately, mass advertisers celebrate and their mass consumers tolerate the reality of commercial communication: the right to know has to currency in the marketplace.