Slashdot Mirror
US Plummets On World Press Freedom Ranking
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Reporters Without Borders released its 2011-2012 global Press Freedom Index. The indicators for press freedom in the U.S. are dramatic, with a downward movement from 27th to 47th in the global ranking, from the previous year. Much of this is correlated directly to the arrest and incarceration of American journalists covering the 'Occupy' protest movements in New York and across the country. 'This is especially troubling as we head into an election year which is sure to spark new conflicts between police and press covering rallies, protests and political events.' Only Chile, who dropped from 33 to 80, joined the U.S. in falling over 100% of their previous ranking. Similarly, Chile was downgraded for 'freedom of information violations committed by the security forces during student protests.'"
The American government should shut down this website before the news gets out.
I'm surprised the US isn't lower.
I don't think they'd rate a Brave New World-esque media as "free".
http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html
Memorable quotes for
Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/quotes
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power. "
"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
-- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000417/bio
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, CIA Director
...that the US would plummet on World Press Freedom rankings given that Fox News literally won the right in court to lie to its viewers.
Thank the drug war and the war on terror for the militarization of the police.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/164695/former-seattle-police-chief-ows-reveals-militarization-our-police-forces
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
comment removed
Seven of the nations that rank "more free" than the United States are former Soviet bloc states.
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
So if journalists are not allowed to be at events to cover them, but can then write all they want (about what they missed?), then that is full freedom? It seems like that is what you're saying
. Not only are you wrong, but I have to wonder what kind of personal bias you have to even go down that line of logic.
You never specified "what happened to the journalists trying to cover OWS", purposely leaving your own argument vague. Probably because if you look at the details, you'll find they were in public space covering the public doing public things.
And yes, being prevented from doing that IS freedom of press, despite your Orwellianesque attempt to redefine the word.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Does falling from 27 to 47 in ranking qualify for your test of significant metrics?
Either way, it's Springtime for Hitler!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Meaningless metric
...and incorrectly applied in any case; 47 is less than twice 27.
What matters is how many places up or down you move.
...of how many total places there are - it's not the same to move down 20 positions out of 200 than 20 out of 21. Or equivalently, what % of the table you move (provided the table has not changed size due to countries being added/removed).
But this is a very subjective topic and even these more appropriate metrics conform a rather incomplete picture of the situation.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
Private Manning comes to mind...
No sig today...
In other news, US dropped 110% in world math rankings...
Freedom of the press is about publishing without interference, not about being able to go anywhere one wants.
It was my understanding that the "occupy" protests, in general, have been occurring in public spaces (this is certainly the case in my city). I don't understand why it would be illegal to go to a public space in order to report on a protest happening there.
If you're talking about cases where journalists have committed illegal trespass, then perhaps I could see your point. But I assume that the press freedom rankings are based on arrests of journalists not committing trespass. I'm thinking about people such as Kristyna Wentz-Graff; since she was released without charge, it would appear that she was not committing a crime when she was arrested.
Either way, it's Springtime for Hitler!
Godwin in 13 minutes. Not bad for a Thursday evening.
Godwin does NOT apply to Mel Brooks references!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I hope this indicates that Reporters Without Borders is moving towards some independence and partisan neutrality, unlike their past performance.
You can either take money from Otto Reich, or you can be an impartial, credible advocate of press freedom. You can't do both.
Reporters Without Borders has chosen to take money from Otto Reich.
As this Wikipedia article explains, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders#Controversies Reich was engaging in propaganda to support military campaigns against left-wing governments governments in Latin America, and he was on the board of the School of the Americas, which trained people in torture and executions.
They accused the Aristide government in Haiti of attacks on the opposition press, but they ignored attacks on journalists under the Latortue government.
no, see... it wasn't a freedom of the press issue, it was a freedom of the reporters issue. Two completely different things! The press is still free to report whatever they want, but the reporters can be imprisoned all the government wants without infringing on that!
^.~
More to the point, why would anyone care what % they drop in a ranking? A ranking is just an ordered list. It says nothing about the criteria used to put the elements in that order.
It's like finishing times for a marathon. If the leading pack crosses together, there could be only a 30 second difference between 1st place and 25th place. Meanwhile there could be a 5 minute difference between 25th place and 26st place. But if you look at just the ranking, you'd think that the 25th place finisher was nearly as bad as the 26th place finisher, when in reality he was actually very close to finishing 1st.
If you want to make relative comparisons like %, you have to look at the finishing times. In particular, the rank order is meaningless for gauging year-to-year changes. What if everyone improved? Then you could drop in rank despite doing better than the previous year.
The arrest of journalist Kristyna Wentz-Graff was not part of some systematic crack down on reporters/journalists. At best it was a swamped cop dealing with a large group and not noticing her credentials, at worst it was an idiot cop, maybe both. To infer, as I think the FA does, that the US is arresting journalists as part of some nation wide crackdown is completely false, or at least very misleading.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
You mean the oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic? Seems he's one of the few who took it seriously.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
To quote Brother George Carlin:
The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club.
This country is finished.
~X~
If they consider direct media ownership by government officials as impinging on freedom of information. For example, Italy's Berlusconi owned controlling interest in much of Italy's media. He received quite a bit more consideration than any other politician would in the modern era. For any other politician a sex scandal would have been a blow to their career, while Berlusconi was only sank by Italy's near bankruptcy. As another example, on the same note, there is very little negative coverage of mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg. While he does not technically run the company, he does own Bloomberg LP which owns Bloomberg TV and US News. He is an unmarried man and most people don't even know the name of his girlfriend(girlfriends?). This is quite a fit for a politician of such high visibility. Clearly, the more media a politician owns, the less negative or controversial coverage they get.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
This is just another in a succession of stories on ./ today that has deeply shaken my faith in democracy and liberty in the civilized world. Earlier today (or maybe last night) there was a story posted about proposed legislation that would require ISPs to log all internet activity of customers in HI for 2 years, which would be accessible to law enforcement (or just about anyone) without a warrant or court order. Add to this the articles about DMCA exemptions for jailbreaking of devices, which are about to expire, and ACTA being signed by 22 European countries. Today, ./ also brought news of the demise of the market for used console games (thanks to Microsoft), the NASDAQ delisting a broadcasting company under pressure from the Chinese government, and a new law that would provide for indefinite logging and retention of online activity of Australian citizens.
SOPA may be on hold, but I fear that we might be losing the war against big content providers and others who want to restrict our rights for financial or political gain. While I appreciate being made aware of these troubling developments, I find today's news to be incredibly distressing and depressing. While the war isn't over, I feel the balance is beginning to shift against us. What else can we do to tip the scales?
Facts have a liberal bias.
...of how many total places there are
Still wrong. What matters is how much you change in the objective measure that is then sorted into a ranking. Someone else used a marathon as an example, go find and read it.
But Manning didn't use any of the legitimate avenues available to him. The US armed services have a variety of way to go around your command structure to report a problem with your command structure (their not idiots!). It's usually a career-ending choice, but it's completely legal. There are ways to be a whistle-blower built into the army.
But that's not what happened - he didn't make any such attempt, he just revealed secrets in violaiton of his oath at the first opportunity. If the military let anyone get away with that sort of BS, we couldn't win a war. The simple fact is - Manning simply had no way of knowing what was really going on with the stuff he leaked, and it's just part of being in any army that you're not going to be told everything that's happening, so you can't really reach conclusions about whether someone distant from you is crossing the line. All you can legitimately do is say "hey this looks bad, that guy's chain of command needs to look at this", or in an extreme case "hey, that guy's entire chain of comman must be corrupt, so the JAG needs to get involved", but you'll never have any of the result of that explained to you.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Totally agree, man. As long as the rape of the Constitution isn't too widespread, it's ok. It's just a little rape.
A decision to not prosecute does not necessarily mean that a crime was not occurring. It may mean that the evidence is not strong enough to get a conviction worthy of the resources spent on it or that the potential downside of continuing the prosecution (as of a journalist) outweighs the punitive measure against the accused.
It's a fair point -- but in the Wentz-Graff case, the police never stated to her or anyone else what crime she was suspected of. The police seem to be running with "oops, we didn't know she was a journalist", which seems implausible given the clearly visible press card in the photographs of her arrest.
Of course, any one case can be put down to incompetence, but this isn't just one case. The SJS editorial linked from the TFA gives other examples, as well as a fairly measured commentary which takes into account the difficulties faced by police.
I agree with you that the explosion of "citizen journalists" creates a bit of a grey area here, but most of the cases under discussion seem to involve salaried, credentialled, professional journalists and reporters taking pains to advertise their status.
Maybe it is just incompetence all round, but the effect is the same whether or not this is a planned policy: journalists are discouraged from reporting on protests by fear that they will be arrested.
Personally, if they gave me my own spacious cave/cell like Hannibal Lecter with free WIFI for reading slashdot and visiting FBI trainees asking about C++ rules for sequence points, I'd consider it.
I did an analysis and found out that the 192 countries average rank was 96.5 the same as last year. We can rest easy knowing that we held steady this year.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
...and incorrectly applied in any case; 47 is less than twice 27.
Actually, the incorrect part is the summary.. the US fell 27 places... from #20 to #47.
And while I will admit there is still a long way we can still fall, perhaps some of us should reflect for a moment about the countries ranked higher than we are, and how they got there, considering where they were (in general, not absolutely speaking in terms of this particular metric) not too long ago... Some of these places were the places I I heard about in school when they talked about repression and how "those commies" were trying to take over the world... Phrases like "Papers, please.... Your papers..." were practically ingrained into our social consciousness, asked of poor innocents in every movie with a scene set in one of these places... I'm extremely glad to hear they are doing so well (and that the stereotypes "may" have been exaggerated ;-) ) But I still have to ask; What the hell is happening to us? Aren't we supposed to be the shining light? Aren't we supposed to be the beacon of hope, the pinnacle of freedom? More importantly, why do so few people seem to care?
Godwin's law does not apply to discussions of fascist or otherwise totalitarian regimes. Absolute statists hide behind that dodge all too often.
Yeah, only a Nazi like Hitler would do something like tha-
Whoops!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Icelandic journalists complain of losing libel cases when all they've done is to publish court records, of fear of retaliation, and of a climate of self-censorship.
One broadcaster was hit with an injunction to prevent them from publishing details about banking misconduct.
Iceland was one of the top-rated countries in that report.
Things don't rise, they skyrocket, they don't drop, they plummet. Cuts are always draconian, oil spews, smoke belches. Now, make sure you keep your notes for the next semester Political Science 101. Class dismissed
"...and yet, I blame society" Duke - Repo Man
I'll get hate for saying it but in this case its probably an insult to the Nazis. During "Springtime for Hitler" in the mid 30s the Nazis were actually quite popular because as Hitler's bodyguard put it in the excellent BBC series "World At War" "At the time we were in a bad way, yes a very bad way. they promised us bread and jobs which seems like such a trivial thing now but then that meant a lot when you couldn't feed your family" so while the Nazis gave the boot to anybody that wasn't like them they also put the country back to work modernizing their systems whereas in America they just ship the jobs overseas or hire illegals and give you the boot. I doubt VERY seriously you'd find the US government popular with anybody but multigenerational superelite who have been making out like robber barons of old.
I'd urge everyone to read this article that drives a stake in the "job creators and lower taxes' lie, followed by this one on corporate taxes and finally some numbers that will make you sick. They are quite a good read and will help to show why we have gotten where we are. Personally i think the elite at the top are trying to condition the public to a mindset of fear so they won't have an uprising spread if they should roll the tanks. they have already seen what the Arab Springs have done to systems that had been there for years and they know they can only juggle the numbers, lie about the true unemployment figures, and print money like there is no tomorrow for so long before the thing falls down and we become another failed country like Greece. I don't know which is worse, the thought they might actually turn the tanks on us or decide that its our turn to be the bad guys and do what Germany did to Poland in South America. But I doubt the rulers at the top of the food chain will just go without a fight, nor do i think after buying the entire congress for years they will just sit by and let the people bring fairness back into the system no matter how badly we as a nation are suffering. i think its gonna get ugly folks, really ugly.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you haven't, read some of Thomas Jefferson's writings. It's shameful how far we've turned from our original ideal, embodied in the Constitution - I know, "just a god damned piece of paper!" - but he warned about just such a possibility. 200+ years can dull the senses and purpose of a country. Seems like it might be time to learn our lesson all over again.
perhaps some of us should reflect for a moment about the countries ranked higher than we are, and how they got there, considering where they were (in general, not absolutely speaking in terms of this particular metric) not too long ago... Some of these places were the places I I heard about in school when they talked about repression and how "those commies" were trying to take over the world... Phrases like "Papers, please.... Your papers..." were practically ingrained into our social consciousness, asked of poor innocents in every movie with a scene set in one of these places...
Curiously, Finland remains one of those countries where there's no general legal requirement to carry identification papers or indeed even to have any - and some people actually don't. (There's presidential election going on here right now, and every now and then people come to vote without papers, and there are a number of ways they can, including bringing along someone who can testify they're who they say they are.)
>What the hell is happening to us? Aren't we supposed to be the shining light? Aren't we supposed to be the beacon of hope, the pinnacle of freedom? More importantly, why do so few people seem to care?
Only two people types of people have ever said that: American politicians and American schoolteachers. Nobody else in the world has EVER thought of you that way, and frankly when us people in the rest of the world think of nations that are the epitomy of civil liberty and freedom - America hasn't even been in the top 10 in decades. The most liberal constitution in the world belongs to an African country for crying out loud.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Who promise wam fuzzies of one type or another.
It isn't left vs right. It's authoritarian vs autarchic.
There are a couple of ironies which are missed in American politics. It's rather bewildering to watch from the outside.
1. On the liberal side: How can liberal ideals, which are literally those which pertain to being free, possibly be accomplished by handing more authority to a centralised bureaucracy?
2. On the conservative side: How can conservative ideals, such as lower taxation possibly be accomplished by increasing legislation, rules, regulations on social issues like abortion, drugs or increasing spending on military or law enforcement?
Both points of view, liberal and conservative are logically inconsistent with the methods being used to achieve them.
It seems to me that you are voting along the wrong axes. The true axis is authoritarian vs autarchic (I won't use the word "liberal" because the meaning has been perverted) and both sides; republican and democrat are authoritarian.
Deleted
Mod parent up. I don't know where Americans get this idea that everyone thinks they are the posterchild for civilization. "The American" in my mind as a child was a gun-toting redneck who liked war and killing.