
US Ranks 41st in Press Freedom Index Thanks to 'War on Whistleblowers' - raddad
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/20/475017281/u-s-ranks-41st-in-press-freedom-index-thanks-to-war-on-whistleblowers
======
russell
From the RFS entry on Surinam, position 22: "“public expression of hatred”
towards the government is punishable by up to seven years in prison under a
draconian defamation law. The controversial Dési Bouterse, who became
president again in 2010 in an election, has managed to be amnestied for the
1982 murders of 15 political opponents including five journalists."

RFS on Jamaica at 10: " The very occasional physical attacks on journalists
must be offset against this, but no serious act of violence or threat to media
freedom has been reported since February 2009, a month that saw two cases of
abuse of authority by the Kingston police."

Or even Ireland at 9: "... defamation lawsuits are common. Finally,
interviewing police sources has been virtually impossible since the Garda
Siochana Act of 2005, which bans police officers from talking to journalists
without prior authorization."

Not a little biased are we? Amnesty for murdering journalists isnt my idea of
freedom of the press, nor are defamation law suits, or a prohibition against
interviewing the police.

~~~
stephentmcm
Defamation law suits are important for curtailing shock-jock journalism,
without them journalists are ultimately free to lie about someone and report
it as fact.

------
protomyth
coming in at #22 is Surinam with a "“public expression of hatred” towards the
government is punishable by up to seven years in prison under a draconian
defamation law."

The ranking for Slovakia at 12 seems at odds with its description "Defamation
is punishable by up to eight years in prison, the harshest penalty for this
offence in the European Union. Many legal actions have been brought by
businessmen, politicians and judicial officials. Prime Minister Robert Fico
initiated several during his first term. Censorship was tightened in 2014 by
the adoption of a regulation limiting the number of journalists with
parliamentary accreditation, restricting their movements within the parliament
and banning them from photographing the personal property of
parliamentarians."

------
ekianjo
Netherlands at the top? The place where offensive tweets gets you a police
visit ? Allright.

------
dogma1138
I personally won't read to much into this, RFS has a very single minded
political agenda, Mongolia has more press freedom than Japan and Italy,
Georgia (in which the government closes TV stations at will) has more freedom
than Greece, and Lebanon's press has apparently more freedom than Israel's.

~~~
wfo
Their methodology is stated very explicitly. They do a questionnaire in all of
the relevant countries and have a formula to derive the scores.

You cannot begin with an intuitive notion of the countries that you want to
have a high "press freedom" index and when the actual scores don't match your
intuition blame it on the assumed bias of the source.

I'm certainly open to the idea that this report is crap, but they have data,
numbers, a sample, formulas, and reasoning and arguments for why they did
things the way they did. If you think they are incorrect, explain why, don't
just say "this doesn't fit my preconceived notions about the countries I want
to believe are more free, so the people who did it are lying".

For example, I'm not at all shocked that they rated Lebanon as having higher
press freedom than Israel, in fact that's probably to me an indicator that
they are doing something right and not just picking out statistical proxies
for western european-style nations.

~~~
dogma1138
Not buying it sorry. I've read the report every year and they don't publish
their aggregated data. The questionnaires are filled by local representatives
of their choosing. They had have made political moves which go against their
own statements and condemnations and they have quite a few very weird picks
that don't even seem to correspond to their own summary of the country.

And while it's true that I can't hold an intuitive understanding of the
freedom of the press in various countries I can some how understand that
countries where the government shuts down TV stations and news papers all day
long probably have less freedom than countries where "organized crime"
harasses Journalists.

~~~
wfo
Okay, I'd buy that the targets of the survey may very well be pre-selected to
align politically with a particular set of positions.

What do you mean by aggregated data? I'm fairly well trained in mathematics
and statistics but I'm not sure what that phrase means -- does it not just
mean the statistics derived from the sample?

And doesn't it matter mostly how /the journalists/ feel about how much press
freedom they have? Journalists may very well not be effected by overreaching
hate crime legislation (journalism rarely involves writing hate speech) though
laypeople see it as a violation of freedom of speech. Organized crime may feel
more oppressive than certain oppressive governments. And the survey only
purports to express the opinions of journalists in many countries about how
free they feel they are, it doesn't pretend to solve a centuries old open
problem in philosophy and accurately define 'freedom' and then measure it.

~~~
dogma1138
Aggregated data means actually publishing the data they've collected not some
numbers that may or may not hold any relevance. For each country they should
publish how many questionnaires were issued, who they were issued too (local
journalists? foreign journalists?) split abuses to actual abuse of power by
the state vs the nature of reporting from conflict zones, and maybe make those
filled questionnaires public with or without the actual names?

------
deepnet
A free press and whistleblowers are essential to democracy.

Without a free press & whistleblowers democracy cannot function.

It is clear from the last five years of leaks that elected governements around
the world feel they must act in secret because they suspect the electorate
would not approve.

Without much more oversight this will worsen.

Free Chelsea Manning. Pardon Edward Snowden. Drop the inditement against
Julian Assange. Offer sanctuary to Mossack Fonesca's whistleblower. Lead by
example.

~~~
kefka
Manning just did a data dump, damn anyone who was actually in there. From what
I understand, there were active agents dossiers in the data Manning released.

That's simply not a responsible whistleblow. Now, turning in bad programs and
illegal operations that the US did, IS responsible discourse: Snowden scrubbed
for potential people in his leaks. He went for policies and plans and
programs, not people.

~~~
beeboop
Isn't it Wikileaks that data dumped, not Manning? I guess you could say
Manning is partially responsible by not giving the data to journalists
instead? Not really sure.

~~~
deepnet
No one was compromised, the leak was an accident.

Wikileaks encrypted the data and were going through it with other journalists
to redact info such as agent details.

They requested the White House also vet each article before publication as did
Greenwald and Poitras for Snowden - the White House never responded in either
case.

Some portion of the raw data leaked by accident when a Guardian Journalist
inadvertently published the decryption key.

Remember this was all pre-Snowden and traditional Journalists were playing
catchup with the necessary security.

Even so no actual harm has ever been shown.

Claims to the contrary have been made as vague press releases, but no actual
harm has ever been shown.

source - [https://theintercept.com/2016/03/30/edward-snowden-noam-
chom...](https://theintercept.com/2016/03/30/edward-snowden-noam-chomsky-
glenn-greenwald-a-conversation-on-privacy/)

------
sachkris
Link to the ranking : [http://rsf.org/en/ranking](http://rsf.org/en/ranking)

Surprising to see that Singapore is at 154 and there is Eritrea below North
Korea.

~~~
victorhooi
When you surprised by Singapore - I assume you mean how low it is?

I may be able to shed some light here - Singapore is considered a "kindly"
dictatorship - basically, the ruling party is efficient and has a historical
track record of running things well.

Corruption, in the normal sense is near zero.

So the population is happy to keep the status quo.

However, opposition to the ruling party is next to non-existent (or was
before, this may have changed), there is little to no freedom of the press
(that includes web blogs), and if you try to challenge the government too
loudly, they tend to either jail you or file defamation suits against you
which they are guaranteed to win, and bankrupt you.

I think it was William Gibson that described Singapore as "Disneyland with the
death penalty" (although this was some time ago).

------
anabis
"Reporters Without Borders retracts Yasuda hostage comments"
[http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/12/29/national/reporte...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/12/29/national/reporters-
without-borders-retracts-yasuda-hostage-comments/)

I am starting to think of them as just another irresponsible NGO.

~~~
wahsd
They've never really been all that particularly responsible. It's reporters
WITHOUT borders after all.

------
calvinbhai
Hard to believe India is at 133. The kind of manufactured news that is peddled
by the Mainstream Media in India with no responsibility, I think it should be
#1 !!

Also, going through the methodology, I couldn't figure out which Indian
languages are included in the survey, so, its quite possible that a major
chunk of the Indian media was left out from the survey just because the
translations were only in Hindi (thats my assumption).

------
anabis
Japan is 72nd, and their biggest beef is "記者クラブ" (Journalist Club) were
established domestic media gets precedence in press conferences.

It partly looks like political maneuvering to get more question time in them.
I wonder how other countries do it. I heard there are "first question rights"
and "first rows" in the US also, so old hands like Helen Thomas had advantage.

------
raddad
Something which likely contributes to this rank or at least gives the
appearance of it is this:

These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America

[http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-
control-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-
control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6)

Note this article is from 2012.

------
xornor
Finland and Russia has the most steepest border in the world if measured by
the freedom of press.

~~~
gulpahum
Finland shouldn't be at the top of the list. There is still self-censorship
going on, especially related to opinions about Russia. It's called
"Finlandization":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization)

~~~
exprA
>especially related to opinions about Russia

What year are you living in? There's certainly some self-censorship in Finnish
media, but it's mostly related to PC-issues (e.g. disproportionate amount of
of crimes committed by foreigners, and especially some humanitarian
immigrants), but that's mostly a political statement by the reporters and
certainly not a government policy (and thus does not extend to all of media).

------
known
"Media does not spread free opinion; it generates opinion." \--Oswald Spengler
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West)

------
known
[http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/04/12/india-
racism_n_96673...](http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/04/12/india-
racism_n_9667336.html)

------
jfaucett
Can anyone provide:

1\. What factors were used in deriving this list?

2\. Who funds this project?

I can't find it anywhere on their site.

~~~
nmrm2
1\. Click on the "World Press Freedom Index" link in the first sentence of the
article, then click on the "METHODOLOGY" link in the subheader (black and
white bar).

2\. Google gives multiple cited sources:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders#Fund...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders#Funding)

[http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Reporters_Without_Borde...](http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Reporters_Without_Borders#Funding_Sources)

~~~
jfaucett
thanks, my device was too small and the methodology link wasn't visible, I
found it after zooming out though.

methodology: [http://rsf.org/en/detailed-
methodology](http://rsf.org/en/detailed-methodology)

questionnairre:
[http://rsf.org/sites/default/files/indexquestionnaire_anglai...](http://rsf.org/sites/default/files/indexquestionnaire_anglais.pdf)

------
wahsd
Let's remember here; Obama's War on Whistleblowers

