The Limits of Memory and the News: Archival Journalism, Law, Ethics, and the Right to be Forgotten

Abstract

The right to be forgotten has been widely discussed from a legal perspective. Courts have analyzed the existence and constitutional compatibility of the right in the national legal order of several jurisdictions around the world. However, even if the right to be forgotten is not a universally recognized right, by understanding how the law approaches tensions that arise between the right to freedom of expression and the rights to seek, impart and receive information, on one hand, and a right to be forgotten, underpinned by the rights to honor, privacy and personal data protection on the other, journalists can extract ethical guidelines that can orient them in the correct use of archival information about individuals to report on current events. This work begins by explaining how legal debates can help inform ethical discussions about journalism. Then, by exploring the legal development and justifications for the right to be forgotten and identifying key elements of this emerging right, we engage in a discussion around the use of archives and memory in journalism and then identify the elements that journalists should consider in relation to the use of archival information in their profession in a way that allows them to fulfill their journalistic duties without ignoring the legal context.

Can the principle of the ‘right to be forgotten’ be applied to academic publishing? Probe from the perspective of personal rights, archival science, open science and post‐publication peer review

“…8(1)) 'Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified' (p. 10) (EU, 2000). Cetina Presuel and Gutiérrez Atala (2022) provide a comprehensive historical background into how privacy and RTBF laws came to exist in the EU/EAA. The contentious part of GDPR, Art.…”

“…Even though independent journalism allows for the unhindered dissemination of any information, the commercialization of news might undermine that liberty, so journalists need to establish a working code of ethics that balances the freedom of expression when imparting information with ‘the rights to honor, privacy and personal data protection’ (p. 67) (Cetina Presuel & Gutiérrez Atala, 2022). This paper does not examine the journalism‐related implications of RTBF, a theme that has been impressively covered and debated by Cetina Presuel and Gutiérrez Atala (2022). Rather, we wish to focus on a more limited and specific sector of journalism, science journalism, that applies to academic publishing.…”

“…Cetina Presuel and Gutiérrez Atala (2022) stated: ‘[j]ournalists can use any social network in ways that can be invasive to the privacy and intimacy of others’ (p. 81). Yet, the ability of academics who may have been profiled by science watchdogs and/or other media organizations to enact RTBF might be limited, especially if ‘personal data’ was used, according to the GDPR, for ‘archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes’ (p. 11) or for ‘legal claims’ (p. 12) (EU, 2016).…”