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The Romanian Constitutional Court has just quashed an attempt by the legislature to make the news media broadcast equal measures of good and bad news.

Politicians in Romania said that too much bad news is being reported and it is bringing people down. Bemoaning the negative effects of bad news on “the health and life of the people”, they successfully put a law through the Romanian senate that required radio and television companies to broadcast one good news story for every bad news story.

The law was sponsored by senators from the National Liberal Party and the far-right Great Romania Party and passed by the Romanian senate. What was needed, the politicians enthusiastically agreed, was less news about depressing things such as incompetent politicians and more news about cheery things.

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They legislated that the National Audiovisual Council would need to judge what was positive news and what was negative news. The chairman of the council, though, was understandably perplexed. He pointed out that such a half-good and half-bad recipe for all news broadcasts would be impossible. He said: “News is news. It is neither positive nor negative. It simply reflects reality.”

The opposition liberal democrats argued that the “good news” law was unacceptable as it restricted freedom of expression. The court agreed, and declared the legislation unconstitutional. That, of course, is good news for democracy.

The legislation was doomed to fail because Romania is now part of the European Union and therefore bound to honour human rights law guaranteeing freedom of expression. Letting a government meddle in what news the people get would be asking for trouble. Free flowing news is the oxygen of democracy.

English law has been disinclined to control the news, despite even judges having been sometimes troubled by journalists. In Mason v Mason, a case about a couple from Basingstoke, the Court of Appeal ruled that it wasn’t “unreasonable behaviour” for a wife to ration her husband to sex once a week. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, said after the case that he didn’t mind the cheeky newspaper headlines which said things such as “Sex once a week enough, appeal judge says” (The Times, December 5, 1980), but he did object to the newspapers that tried to get interviews with the judge’s wife.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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