Pacific Views

We never really needed freedom of the press, anyway.

And a good thing, too. Otherwise, those of us in the US might find it worrisome that Reporters Without Borders' latest Press Freedom Index puts the US at #53 worldwide. If you're counting, that's just below the Dominican Republic and a bit ahead of Hong Kong.

To put the poor state of press freedom in the US in a bit more perspective, the US ranked #17 on the 2002 index and #44 just last year. This is not the kind of performance that a country should brag about.

How low can the US go? [Data: Reporters Without Borders]

Why has the US dropped so quickly down the index since 2002? One word: Dubya.

Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of "national security" to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his "war on terrorism." The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media's right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.

Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf was imprisoned when he refused to hand over his video archives. Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, who works for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, has been held without trial since June 2002 at the US military base at Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been held by US authorities in Iraq since April this year.

Reporters Without Borders has more information on this year's Press Freedom Index here. There's a description of how the index was complied here, and the list of questions used this year is here.

An interesting sideline: If you look at 2002's Press Freedom Index, you'll see that Hong Kong was right below the US that year (at #18), just as it is on the 2006 index. Hong Kong's huge drop since then is due to limitations on press freedom imposed by China's communist government and by Beijing's sock puppets in Hong Kong. It's sad that the US, a country that's supposedly a bastion of freedom, has a press only marginally freer than that of Hong Kong, which is part of a country that has some of the most draconian restrictions on free expression on the planet. But with Dubya in charge of the US for the last six years, who needs communists to take away our freedoms, eh?

Posted by Magpie at October 25, 2006 01:28 PM | Media | TrackBack(1) | Technorati links |