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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)."
The country responsible for getting the Indymedia servers pulled?
... 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.
"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
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.
It's true that the Danish penal code has parts regarding libel, slander, threats, etc. just as many other countries (penal code - "Straffeloven" - 266). This paragraph also contains a note regarding the above issues aimed at groups because of their race, color, ethnicity, faith or sexual orientation. Personally I don't think it's that different from targeting individuals (but hey, I'm a Dane :). The paragraph has been discussed now and then in the public, but the borders are actually quite wide. It's nothing like Germany or France (.. I pressume)
Besides, this has nothing to do with press freedom. A Danish nazi party is actually allowed to run their own radio station at the ordinary FM-band.
We did have an interesting case though regarding a radio documentary in 1985, where an interviewer talked with a bunch of young, declared racists ("Greenjackets"), spreading their racism. At first the interviewer was convicted of spreading racism at a lower court, but after appealing through the system (and even losing at Danish supreme court), he tried his case in front of the European Court of Human Rights which concluded that even though some of the statements made by the Greenjackets would be racist, the broadcast itself wasn't. You can read the entire case online.
It's actually a bit surprising when documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11 (or, on a more serious level, Control Room), show how news are presented in the US. I think that many Danes weren't that surprised viewing these documentaries, because the Danish press already used several sources, meaning that a lot of the "surprising stories" in these documentaries weren't that surprising at all, since a lot of the footage had already been shown in public media.
I am pretty worried of US citizens believing that each and every single thing about US is the best in the world. We have a more free press, less corruption, a head of government elected by popular vote, but since we live in a world where people appearently get their "entire facts" based on one or two incidents (which is pretty usual at Slashdot - think of all the posts regarding any topic, where one would find a random incident about a webserver, a company, a product and continuously beat that argument in a manner like "How can you say this product is good, since (link to some old event)?"), nothing of this matters. It only matters if people are able to use Google to find that little piece of information, they care about and judge the rest of the world by that.
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd
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.
Steven Colbert: After all, it was Thomas Jefferson who said "Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach."
Jon Stewart: No, that was Stalin. Thomas Jefferson said that he'd "Rather have free press and no government, than a government and no free press".
Steven Colbert: Well, what else would you expect from a slave-banging, Hitler loving queer?
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd