Freedom of speech and media plurality in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

• Autor(a) principal: Bosse, Giselle
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Hopner, Moritz, Vieira, Alena
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/83724
• topic: Ciências Sociais::Ciências Políticas

[Excerpt] In 2020, the world was confronted with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The gravity of the global situation led most governments – even those least affected by, and most sceptical of, the virus – to take emergency measures to limit the infection as much as possible. Many countries declared a state of emergency to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, giving the legal grounds to intensify regulations in various areas of citizens’ daily life: according to Cherevko (2020), the most evident restrictions were related to freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, and privacy rights. Emergency measures also led to deteriorating conditions of media freedom on all continents, with media operations often obstructed or limited during the lockdown regimes (Cherevko 2020; Désir 2020). Some countries cut the funds from public service media in order to fund other sectors, while others actively censored the content of the Fourth Estate (Désir 2020).