Slashdot Mirror
US Slips Again In Freedom of the Press Ranking
npwa writes to tell us Reporters Without Borders has released their annual worldwide press freedom index. While developing nations like Haiti and Mauritania continue to gain ground developed nations like France, Japan, and the US continue their downward spiral. From the article: "The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. 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."
And where the hell is "Irland" (3)? You would think they know how to use a spell*&*&&!@# .... never mind,I figured it out.
mod parent up.
Yes, america does too much for other countries... like take their oil, kill their people, take their resources, emit greenhouse gasses...
You can see freedom of the press right there. It is the Fox News of the liberal agenda. I don't see anyone censoring that paper. CNN is very liberal. Dan Rather can go on air with a false story showing the president in a bad light and he didn't go to jail. How the US can be 53rd in the world is beyond me.
The media has self-created the right to anonymous and unchallenged sources, and it's something that I find incredibly damaging. There are literally thousands of daily reports that rely on 'unnamed sources'. The incredible power the media wields is often done without the burden of transparency. They can make wild accusations, attribute them to some unnamed source, and pass their reporting as fact. The public is left to either simply trust them, or disregard the news completely.
I beleive that the 'right' to protect sources is a fundamentally flawed one. It's always funny to read a story about the lack of transparency in the Bush administration, with a unnamed administration official happy to corroborate it (the irony!). The media has the luxury of shifting the burden of proof from themselves to the accused. Since the journalist doesn't have to name their source, one must prove their innocence simply because some journalist pointed the finger.
All of this really points to a much larger problem, the press is accountable to no one. They have succeeded in creating a culture in which the media gets to play judge and jury, all while operating under a veil of secrecy. They swarm on stories like locusts, and when they've sucked the life out of people they simply move on. Facts don't seem to matter, and they certainly aren't interested in accepting responsibility for their mistakes.
For example, the University of Colorado football team was embroiled in a scandal a couple of years ago. Accusations of rape, sex for recruits, and general nastiness was levied against the program. Sports Illustrated ran a story which largely relied on highly questionable (although the article convienently left that out) and unnamed sources. The only problem? A series of subsequent investigations by both the state of Colorado, local police, and the University itself found little to no evidence to corroborate any of it. The whole thing turned out to be little more than a bunch of college kids attending college parties. Did the media stick around to report that? Nope, they had already long packed up and moved on to the next media dog-pile in hopes of ruining a few more lives so they could make a few more bucks.
It is this lack of accountability that disturbs me. A free press is great, but we need to find some way to hold journalists accountable for what they report. The problem is, any attempt at accountability is seen as a threat to that freedom surely knocking the U.S. down a few more spots. Yet it's something that is absolutely needed. The Watergate story served as a water-shed moment. Journalists now aspire to BECOME the news (see the celebrity Woodward and Bernstein enjoy now) and in doing so they hold themselves to a lower standard of reporting as long as the gravity of the story is sufficiently high. It seems that anything goes in journalism, as long as you didn't plagarize anything.
So my question is simple: How do we balance freedom of the press with a need for a truly accountable one?
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
just a few corrections:
1. Prove it. Lenin and Stalin during there time killed more of their own people than any direct action of hte US can be linked to. Hitler put to death 6 million Jews and started a war that killed quite a few more. Now lets try to actually use something that is factual.
4. No person can be saved by AIDS drugs!!! AIDS is a terminal illness. If you have it, it will kill you. So what you are saying is the US has decided to not prolong the life of terminally ill patients in the name of placating an industry. I'm not saying its better or worse, just the truth.
8. Name one genocidal event that Israel took part in in the last 16 years. I knwo you will just call me ignorant of what is right in front of everyone elses face, but all I see is a group of Palestinians that keep being given things by Israel and then continue to purposefully pick a fight. So give me something. Some proof of a general attempt to exterminate the Palestinians.
What I find far more incredible that no one says "Hey, look at Israel economically helping a group of people that continue to launch attacks on its civilians. They collect taxes for the government and have even transferred money to it. I wonder why they would do that?" You might want to ponder that before you go and claim genocide.
Now previous to 16 years ago, you can claim a great deal of bad things were done by Israel. But the funny thing is, they were always precipitated by far worse from the Palestinians. So at worst you can say they responded in a measured manner.
SWIFT was not legal in EU *and* US jurisdictions. Over here, we take our privacy rights more seriously, and this is why, for example, for example the Belgian Data Privacy Commission and the Swiss Federal Data Protection Commissioner have denounced the scheme. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/17/swiss_swif t_transfers_illegal/
Oh, and by the way, the July 2005 bombings were carried out with only £3000. And Muslim terrorists use the hawala system to move money around without alerting banks, so its effectiveness is moot. Please tell me of a case where this data helped to catch a terrorist. Oh no! Wait, you can't tell me, because it's not just the detainees and the charges but the evidence that's secret.
The scheme certainly was secret, though, even from those government departments whose remit is cross-border data transfer.
Tom
There is no such right. Nobody has any inherent right to be able to speak publically but anonymously, thus not taking responsibility for their words, through a third party. Having said that, I can see a governmental interest to protect or reward such speech in certain circumstances, such as with wistleblowers. However, such protection, under our Constitution, should come from the legislature, not the Courts.
and the rest of the world is your problem, that is if you want to stop them wanting to fly airplanes into your assets Oh, and it's ALL our fault that someone got a bug up their ass about the US being "Satan" and in "defending the muslim world" decide to slam planes into building killing thousands of people. I'm sure the next thing you will say is that we brought it on ourselves for not buying off the pooer countries in the world.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with this rating that puts the US below Tonga in freedom of the press. They will point to the unfettered access to the internet, the newspaper that is printed in their city (probably there's only one) the TV news channel that they occasionally watch, and the web pages that they skim for news. 'How could there be any restrictions on the press?' they might think. News is the access to information about things that are happening and that access is much more controlled and restricted than it used to be. In fact, 100 years ago there wasn't even any such thing as 'access' which was just expected and assumed. (No one would have even dared to tell a newspaper guy in World War I that he couldn't go somewhere.) As a result, most of the national and international news originates from a very small handful of people working for a few large media companies who are 'given' access to people and places where things are happening. We know less than we used to about what is really going on in Iraq or Haiti or Venezuela or China and instead we just get the 'official' line mixed with a lot of spin and opinion. Bloggers can write about anything they want but, unless someone gives them a tip (which the government would want to later know the identity of), they have no better access to information than you do.
"Why the hell do people in the USA expect the palestinians to accept something similar?"
They should be lucky to get even that after wholeheartedly engaging in a war of extermination against the Israelis.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"in Kashmir journalists have been attacked by both the police and radical seperatists"
>
By separatists, you mean those who have been trying to get Kashmir transfered to Pakistan? It has always been part of India.
Where were you when the voynix came?