Slashdot Mirror
Press freedom
GarconDuMonde writes "Reporters San Frontiers has released it's third annual worldwide index of press freedom. Although the majority of top-ranking countries are from northern Europe, it is perhaps more interesting to note where countries such as Switzerland, Italy, the UK and the USA fall (1, 39, 28 and 22, respectively)."
... but don't practice it. It's pretty sad when you have to cringe every time you hear "... land of the free ..." Not that the U.S. is a bad place to live, mind you. The United States is the best place to live if you happen to like money.
Comparing the Western European countries with vast freedoms of the press to the dictatorial or communist countries with outright persecution of journalists is eye-opening. What is most disturbing is that in this day and age that there still exists repression of thought in some countries. Control the media and you can control the minds of your subjects. To have a truly free thinking society means that the media cannot be controlled.
The only problem with this is that it leads to significant growth of tabloid press. Look at Europe again with its outrageous papers like the Sun or Pravda. Just because the press is free does not mean that the information is better, just more voluminous.
Like the internet, anyone in a free press country can publish what they like. Like the internet, it is up to the reader to filter out the gems from the trash.
It's interesting to note the results and see why it's difficult to trust ANY news coming from Iraq.
How are we expected to know what's really going on when reporters feel threatened and ordinary Iraqis still don't trust the media after years of it being state controlled?
There are other documented examples or Arab gangs intimidating the press to sing their own tune and it pretty well rights off any ability for readers to discern between news versus propaganda.
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
"Reporters Without Borders compiled the index by asking its partner organisations (14 freedom of expression organisations in five continents), its 130 correspondents around the world, as well as journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists, to answer 52 questions to indicate the state of press freedom in 167 countries"
So this leaves lots unsaid. Basically, if correspondents say they don't have press freedom, they don't. Doesn't seem like a very scientific study to me.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I think that the biggest threat to the free press in the United States today comes from the owners of media conglomerates, not the government. The continuing centralization of media ownership and the ongoing lobbying campaign in support of media consolidation leave us with an oligarchy of giant media groups. Often, the major media outlets of a city are owned by one or two large corporations, with interlocking ownership.
Under those conditions, the views of the owners are propagated without check, because there simply is no real independent mass media in most parts of the US today. They censor themselves, so the government doesn't have to.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's what they had to say about the USA and Canada The two North American giants score well A police raid in Canada on the home of journalist Juliet O'Neil and the national regulatory authority's stand against the pan-Arab radio station Al-Jazeera and the local station CHOI FM downgraded the country to 18th place. Violations of the privacy of sources, persistent problems in granting press visas and the arrest of several journalists during anti-Bush demonstrations kept the United States (22nd) away from the top of the list. Really, we're being accused of minor things in the grand scheme of things... the top of the list contries are just small enough to be lucky to have not had any incidents.
The reason is that they allow themselves to be completely neutral. They don't care if they have George Bush's money in a bank account or Saddam Hussein's money, it's all the same to them.
When a country's government is neutral, it allows for the media to be more openly objective. These laws allow for equal treatment of everyone. The only problem with that is you are --I hate to sound cliche-- "helping terrorism."
That's nothing. You can be jailed anywhere in the world if the US president thinks you're a terrorist. Give me a Danish judge any day.
Americans frequently claim that others are "jealous" of their freedom.
It's interesting that they use "jealous" rather than "envious" because "jealous" implies a limited resource (two women wanting to date the same man, for example) whereas "envious" implies an unlimited resource (envying your friend's new computer - new computers are available to anyone who wants to buy one).
There seems to be a subconscious fear in the United States that if the rest of the world gets "freedom" or "wealth" that the United States will somehow lose it.
There is no reason the whole world can't have high levels of freedom and a high standard of living and high levels of education.
The fear that the United States is preventing other countries from having these things seems to lead to the fear that if other countries get these things then the United States will lose them.
Of course, depsite what most Americans seem to think, the United States doesn't come in first in most measures of quality of life (freedom of press, per capita income, education level, etc.) anyway so it's not clear what they are so worried about.
You're looking at this too practically.
Freedom isn't much good, admittedly, if no one bothers to exercise it. What this article measures, however, is not the quality of information provided by the local press; rather, it is the ease with which journalists are able to obtain information in a country without the government interfering.
American journalists don't take much advantage of the US's open nature, because our private media are here to sell news, and Americans culturally just don't care about what's happening in the world. I really don't think there's much of a conspiracy here. The US is a huge country, the most powerful in the world, bordered by another huge country that speaks the same language it does. People in the US just don't care too much about the rest of the world unless it affects their lives directly, and the truth is that as far as US citizens are concerned, what happens in most other countries has little bearing on their daily lives.
This is hard to understand for a lot of Europeans, who mostly come from small countries that don't have the same natural resources the US does. For someone in France or Germany, what happens in Poland, Belgium, the UK, Turkey -- this all can and does affect their daily lives, economic stability, etc, in a way that is evident to the average joe. And so, not surprisingly, these people are better informed than Americans when it comes to world issues.
Now, the press freedom in the US is pretty good. By this I mean that a reporter from Le Monde can go to the US with the intent to write an exposé on American government corruption, for example, and will run into very little static doing it. A New York Post reporter, in a similar way, will have little trouble getting the information he wants in France, even if his piece is called "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys: How a country entirely populated by homosexuals manages to remain adequately populated." This is because both the US and France are very free countries. And while the journalists of other countries may use this to abuse them, they understand that keeping information available is important.
China and North Korea, on the other hand, will want to "approve" what you write before letting you do anything. They may even offer to write it for you.
That's what's meant by press freedom. Not "is the local press open and non-self-censoring" but rather "do journalists have the freedom to ask questions and get them answered without too much interference."
The US scores badly on the first but passably well (although not as well as I, as an American, would like) on the second. This article is about the second, not the first.
The United States is now hated around the world because our citizens are so misinformed and ignorant about the world
No, your citizens have always been misinformed and ignorant. That is not why the US is now hate. It's now hated because it invades countries, kills innocent people, tortures people, and tries to impose its beliefs and way life on everybody else. That is why the USA is hated. But then again, being an American you might be too ignorant to know that.
BTW, nobody in the rest of the world gives a fuck about your freedom of the press or any other freedom. The rest of the world simply wants USA to leave them the fuck alone.