Freedom of the Press

[psychodiva]

Reporters Without Borders has its annual report out about Press Freedom- I'm ashamed to note that the UK came 28th and I'm not surprised to see the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands up at the top as usual

There have been some interesting shifts due to the 'Arab Spring' and other such stuff- any thoughts?

[Smellyoldgit]

Media Overview:

24. Does the government control the state-owned media’s editorial policies? (yes/no)

I guess the BBC may be slightly shagged!

[required]

USA is number 47... hasn´t Obama or anyone have anything to say about that? Pathetic. And Assange or Manning don´t get even mentioned in the article.

[Davin]

required wrote

USA is number 47... hasn´t Obama or anyone have anything to say about that? Pathetic. And Assange or Manning don´t get even mentioned in the article.

Just wait to see our score after ACTA, SOPA and PIPA! We'll shoot right up the list, I bet we'll hit well over 100 next time!

[Irreligious]

required wrote

USA is number 47... hasn´t Obama or anyone have anything to say about that? Pathetic. And Assange or Manning don´t get even mentioned in the article.

What do you want him to say?

Reporters getting beat up by overzealous police is nothing new in the United States. It happens on occasion in far less high profile cases than the Occupy movement.

Now please do not mistake my comment as an endorsement of this egregious behavior or even as a cavalier attitude towards it, but there has always been the potential of danger for reporters in the U.S. when directly covering police in the midsts of mass crackdowns on protesting citizens.

My point is, we have a Constitution that guarantees freedom of the press and I'm wondering what the U.S. federal government has done to abridge this guaranteed freedom, because the full article that I downloaded doesn't say.

[ubs]

Irreligious wrote

Reporters getting beat up by overzealous police is nothing new in the United States. It happens on occasion in far less high profile cases than the Occupy movement.

Actually, it is new. Hence the 27 level drop in the US score.

And as far as what do we want Obama to say? Nothing. The worst civil liberties record of any President. There really is nothing to say.

[lostsheep]

ubs wrote

Actually, it is new. Hence the 27 level drop in the US score.

And as far as what do we want Obama to say? Nothing. The worst civil liberties record of any President. There really is nothing to say.

In what ways? I do find him disappointing, but I was not aware of this.

[ubs]

lostsheep wrote

In what ways? I do find him disappointing, but I was not aware of this.

You first. What is it you find disappointing?

[Irreligious]

ubs wrote

Actually, it is new. Hence the 27 level drop in the US score.

It's new in relation to the Occupy movement, but then so is the Occupy movement itself, which started only a year ago.

But there are hundreds of reporters for local newspapers, radio and TV stations around the country, a small fraction of whom have undoubtedly experienced the wrath of local police officers in the course of doing their jobs over the years. This, I assure you, is not new, however infrequently it may occur.

I'm personally aware of a couple of instances where reporters have been abused by police while investigating a story. How many such instances occur annually around the country, I couldn't tell you, and it's not clear from the article that Reporters Without Borders keeps track of these isolated incidents across the U.S. when they're not connected to a mass movement.

ub wrote

And as far as what do we want Obama to say? Nothing. The worst civil liberties record of any President. There really is nothing to say.

I don't know who "we" is supposed to be, but I'm well aware that President Obama can't die from a heart attack soon enough to suit you, specifically.

Otherwise, I'm not aware of any executive order that he is supposed to have signed which directs police anywhere to beat and detain reporters for daring to cover the Occupy protests around the country.

However, I am aware that the president has sorely disappointed, angered and outraged civil libertarians with his extension of some of President George W. Bush's so-called "anti-terrorism" policies aimed at thwarting "enemy combatants," ostensibly and very specifically. I'm perplexed by this symbiosis on the part of Obama's and W's administrations too, but I still don't see exactly what it has to do with local police departments cracking down on journalists covering the Occupy movement.

How are they connected in your mind?

[Victus]

psychodiva wrote

Reporters Without Borders has its annual report out about Press Freedom- I'm ashamed to note that the UK came 28th and I'm not surprised to see the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands up at the top as usual

There have been some interesting shifts due to the 'Arab Spring' and other such stuff- any thoughts?

required wrote

USA is number 47... hasn´t Obama or anyone have anything to say about that? Pathetic. And Assange or Manning don´t get even mentioned in the article.

Irreligious wrote

Reporters getting beat up by overzealous police is nothing new in the United States. It happens on occasion in far less high profile cases than the Occupy movement.

ubs wrote

Actually, it is new. Hence the 27 level drop in the US score.

Although I agree without the general point of decreasing civil (and economic) liberties, I don't think the dramatic drop in ranking by the US is all that, well, dramatic. Navigating to the main site of the group that created the index, I see...

Reporters Without Borders wrote

In order to have a bigger spread in the scores and increase the differentiation between countries, this year’s questionnaire had more answers assigning negative points. That is why countries at the top of the index have negative scores this year. Although the point system has produced a broader distribution of scores than in 2010, each country’s evolution over the years can still be plotted by comparing its position in the index rather than its score. This is what the arrows in the table refer to – a country’s change in position in the index compared with the preceding year.

Or in short, they changed the index. The last bit is, of course, incorrect. Changing the contents of the index changes the scores, which changes ranks, which makes cross-year comparisons problematic at best and completely meaningless at worst, depending on the degree of change.

Probably a better way of comparing the US (or any country) across the 2010 and 2011 indices would be to look at the z-score distributions for countries across each year...



On the left is the distribution for 2010 with a normal distribution imprinted over. On the right is the same graph with the same parameters using the new 2011 index. Negative scores represent greater press freedom on the index. On both graphs I plotted the US's position on the standardized scores. Notice the lack of an obvious difference.

Or look at a scatter plot of the standardized z-scores for the two years...



The US is the red square. Deviation from the trend line can be thought of as deviation between the distribution on the indices across the two years. The US is more or less on the trend line.

Of course, all this only shows the relative position of the US in the indices over time. It doesn't tell us if there was an absolute change over the years (since the indices changed, we cant know that one way or the other). But based on the distribution of scores, and assuming the world has degenerated into a authoritarian hell-scape in the last 12 months, the US hasn't experience a significant decline in press freedom recently.

[Kinich Ahau]

Hey Required, Finland #1. I don't mind if you gloat a bit

[required]

Kinich Ahau wrote

Hey Required, Finland #1. I don't mind if you gloat a bit

Well, OK, wohoo!

You know,we´re so fucking liberal that we may have an openly homosexual president in a couple of weeks http://yle.fi/uutiset/news/2012/01/s...n_3199624.html

[Broga]

This is a fascinating and disturbing list. And yes, congratulations to Finland and other top countries. There was a time when freedom of speech was something in which the UK would be proud. I don't know when the rot set in but Tony "I'm now a Roman Catholic" Blair and his obnoxious bully of a sidekick, Alistair Campbell, must have contributed to the slippage. So what have we in the UK? A tightly controlled media whose media barons meet with and influence politicians. They meet socially, attend each others family weddings, and politicians get a favourable press when they do as they are instructed. Tony Blair at the start of his premiorship flew to Australia to meet Rupert Murdoch.

The BBC, once the pride of the UK, is increasingly mired in the same censorship slime. Atheists are banned from almost all its programmes and totally banned from its daily and dire religious slot the execrable Thought for the Day. Reporting on paedo priests is close to non existent, even when nearby brave Ireland was rattling Ratzinger's cage. The fawning coverage of Ratzinger by the BBC is a disgrace. And we have a twee and mind numbingly dull annual talk to her subjects from our religious Queen who pushes the religious message.

[ILOVEJESUS]

CBBC is totally unbiast.

[psychodiva]

Yes its not really a 'deep' article is it