may be established by a federal law to protect personal, family, professional, commercial, service or state secrets, as well as to ensure observance of public morality. A list of data constituting service and state secrets shall be set forth in detail by federal law." In all fairness, the new Russian press law, with all the opportunities it offers to control the press, is an improvement over the Soviet regime. The Yeltsin law does abolish censorship and jamming and states that "a journalist has the right to seek, solicit, and disseminate information" and to have access to the scenes of natural calamities, accidents, catastrophes, riots, rallies, street marches, and state-of emergency areas. *** In stark contrast to the Continental model permitting such detailed and dangerous limitations on press freedom is the U.S. model. The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights of 1791 (two years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man) gives the press blanket protection: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." This, however, did not settle the matter. It was an ongoing struggle to get the Supreme Court to recognise, which it did only in 1931, that the writers of the U.S. Constitution meant just what they said. And the struggle to enforce that view continues. Free speech and its megaphone - the free press - are so central to the exercise of other freedoms that Thomas Jefferson, the most articulate formulator of American constitutional philosophy, said: "Our liberty depends in freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost." The First Amendment of the Constitution merely protects the press against the power of government. It places no special obligations or responsibilities upon the press, surely not to advance the government's causes or interests, nor to keep its secrets. The 17th- and 18th-century English and French philosophical traditions underpinning that approach assume that, given the chance, good ideas will drive out bad ones, that the remedy for ill-conceived or badly motivated speech is simply more speech. This assumes that the press must be given the right to be both wrong and irresponsible. The corrective to a bad press is the press itself. The first and strongest defence against the press is more press - meaning competition and free debate. The most effective way of correcting misleading or mistaken journalism comes from other press outlets. Twentieth century history shows that the danger from irresponsible government is far greater than that from irresponsible media. A free press is indispensable as a check on irresponsible government. The psychological insecurity of countries emerging from 50 to 75 years of totalitarianism makes the desire for detailed legal and/or professional codes of press conduct perfectly understandable. But the combined and comparative experience of the countries where press freedom was invented Britain, France, and America - clearly shows that, when it comes to the press, less law means more freedom. That does not mean there should be no law at all. The British experience, where there is no constitutional guarantee of press freedom, shows the danger of depending solely on democratic tradition to protect free speech. This has opened the way to a number of recent and current governmental and legislative attempts to curb both print and broadcast media in Britain. The pressure for such limitations has been generated in part by the sensationalist fringe of the popular press (often fed revelations from behind the scenes by some of those very persons who depict themselves as victims of the press). To avert restrictive lawmaking, the press needs to generate sound practices - both for their own intrinsic value and as a defence against the ever-present press controllers. Yet, while every good journalist knows there is an ethical dimension to nearly everything he or she does, no outside power can decree that behaviour without stifling it. The American model of press freedom is not offered here as an example because it is American but because it in fact provides a middle way between the danger of no constitutional guarantee, as in the British model, and of over-regulation, as in the Continental model. The most extreme example of codification gone amok is undoubtedly Sweden. There, legislative efforts to counteract the free workCSCE ODIHR BULLETIN Vol. 2, No. 1 14