As with any other fundamental right, media freedom requires defining those who benefit from its protection. Beneficiaries of media freedom are ‘the media’. Marshall McLuhan defined ‘media’ as extensions of human senses, including, for example, the spoken and the written word, radio and television broadcasting, but also clothing, housing and money. Yet this is not the concept underlying media freedom. Rather, the kinship of media freedom and freedom of expression suggests that media freedom is related to communication media based on journalistically gathered and edited content. Within the framework of human communication – author, content, medium and one or more recipients – ‘the media’ is to be characterised as ‘authors’, or more specifically, as persons or institutions generating information and ideas on a journalistic basis and disseminating them via facilities of mass communication to an undefined number of recipients.

The media as ‘authors’ of information and ideas

A message originates from a creator or author, and it is transmitted by a medium. Insofar as they create and publish information and ideas, journalists and media entities are such authors. By contrast, a mere medium only transmits or disseminates a third-party statement. The main difference between ‘the media’ as a legal concept and ‘media’ as the plural of medium is that ‘the media’ are content providers, whereas a medium is a mere speech facilitator, particularly a transmitter. Examples of mere speech intermediaries are newspaper vendors, communication network and service providers, search engines, news aggregators, social networks and website operators, insofar as they host unredacted comments from users. These mere facilitators of communication provide a platform for the possibility of media publications, but are not part of the fabrication of the publication themselves.