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US Plunges To 46th In World Press Freedom Index
schwit1 writes "Reporters Without Borders puts out their Press Freedom Index every year, and the 2014 ranking came out today. It was not a good showing for the U.S. Specifically, the U.S. registered one of the steepest falls of all nations, down 13 slots to the #46 position, just above Haiti and just below Romania."
Free nation! Under God! Best thing since apple pie.
The US has really fallen from its optimistic condition so many decades ago. And that failure is not the worst thing about it. It's the fact that no one in the US seems to care.
When all the news source belong to big corporations, how can one be surprised that press freedom is disappearing ?
One solution
Wait a minute, they're complaining that press freedom has dropped because of Manning and Snowden? Who exactly doesn't know about that because as far as I can tell the press ran wild with it. Seems press freedom worked rather well to uncover quite a lot.
"How's that 'hopey-changey' stuff workin' out for ya?"
I can't wait until Bush is no longer president and we don't have things like this happen.
Whats that? A Democrat has been in the White house for 5 years? Never mind, this must be a fictional story.
How's that working out for ya'll?
It's too bad that the /. editor that posted this didn't dig into this shoddy piece of journalism before posting. You can read more about how arbitrary this "ranking" is at On The Media and then move along, there's nothing to see here.
The Guardian was ordered to destroy their copies of the Snowden leaks as the GCHQ watched; how is the UK _above_ the US in reporting matters?
Think for yourself, but have a look here.
Their statistics suck, even if their principles are sound.
well, you know, freedom isn't free, and our's is especially expensive because, uhh, big corporations! no, capitalism! yes, if the government ran the press, we'd be first for sure!!
Without passing judgement on the ratings, why doesn't a country like Afghanistan or Iraq strive to beat the US in ratings like these? God knows they could easily do it.
but this is just a rank based on a number calculated according to an arbitrary weighting of factors. It is possible that the rank drop of the US might have been less had the factors used in calculating the score been weighted differently, or the cases used to arrive at the score been characterized somewhat differently.
For example, the score weights "Pluralism" twice as much as "self-censorship" and four times as much as "transparency". Why? Can such things be weighted precisely at all?
The scores for these factors are likewise arbitrarily scaled numbers in the range 0-100. The ranking of each country is a linear combination of non-parametric factors; as such the rank on such a score is so arbitrary as to be practically meaningless, or at best very imprecise.
I think such a score might have some value in comparing a country's performance to its prior performance, or even to compare progress made in one country vs. another -- provided it is taken with a large grain of salt. But the nature of the score is such that very little can be inferred about country A vs. country B based on their relative ranks.
As a liberal geek I'm all up for harsh criticism of America as a nascent plutocracy, but this particular story is just manufactured controversy.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
haven't you ever spent time going over product reviews loaded with benchmark charts? small variations mean very little, but when there are closely spaced items, it can really mix up the rankings. Learn some math, people!
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
You're just bitter because some of the media passes messages you don't agree with or in your proto-totalitarian view they should not be allowed to. A very partisan view.
What?
Do you know how stories are chosen?
Whatever gets viewers to watch in between advertisements.
What gets people to watch?
FEAR! and more fear!!
Fear that the "other side" is going to ram their values down your throat. Fear that terrorists are going to blow you up! Fear that global warming is going to somehow take away your "way of life" - whatever that means.
Fear fear fear fear fear fear ... ALL BULLSHIT.
You know why Jon Stewart and Colbert are so popular? Because they point out the stupidity of our leaders and of our media.
The media (especially cable news and AM radio) make BILLIONS of dollars bullshitting all of us and making us fight among ourselves.
Pick a topic. AGW. Why do conservatives hate it so much? Why do they insist on listening to deniers who have no expertise in the field who denounce it and why do they insist on bringing up Al Gore as the "expert" and not the real experts who are making it their life's work to study it? Why? Distraction.
It would be like me criticizing Christianity by using Bill Maher as my "expert". Really?
Let's take a conservative cause that I believe in: government spending - or too much of it. The facts are Medicare (medical for old people) and the military are the BIGGEST draws on our government's finances but yet, the media focuses on dipshit little things or vague references to "entitlement programs" that everyone seems to think means "welfare queens in there pink Cadillacs."
Why is that?
Maybe the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower (R) warned us about doesn't want us to know the truth.
And how is that when one mentions that fact, he is immediately labeled a "liberal" (which has become a derogatory term) ?
Just ask yourself who told you to believe that.
Big media are ALL liars. No exceptions.
I was quite puzzled to see a country with lower Freedom index that North Korea. The gap is quite large (82 versus 85 points of 'non-freedom'). Even if they have described the method used (and misnamed it 'methodology', but thats separate story), they don't give detailed per-country factors, so it is not possible to understand _why_ given country is lower or higher in the ranking.
Actually, after reading further, it is based on _questionaire_. It might just mean that Eritrean citizens are allowed to complain about their country more than NK ones... or that NK data is based on imagination of journalists as opposed to interviews with ones which escaped from Eritrea.
...he'll turn that right around.
Kazakhstan greatest country in the world all other countrys are run by little girls.
Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium!
Other countries have inferior potassium.
Kazakhstan is 161 on the list. Try harder next year Americans.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
According to this article, there are plenty of reasons to doubt these rankings, even if press freedom in the U.S. is worrying. And ranking changes like these are not new. Here are the U.S.' rankings over the last 10 years (there's a typo in their own press release, the U.S. actually fell 14 slots):
2004: 22
2005: 44
2006: 53
2007: 48
2008: 36
2009: 20
2010: 20
2011: 47
2012: 27
2013: 32
2014: 46
That seems...a bit inconsistent. Again, that's not to say there isn't plenty to worry about in the U.S., but I'd still take these rankings with a grain of salt.
At least the US will be #1 in % of population in prison for the foreseeable future.
Questionnaire respondents are probably confusing Freedom of the Press with whatever headline is hot the week of the survey.
Thank God we God rid of that evil Bush and now we have a President who respects the Constitution !!!
Goddamn it, I was hoping to see it at 42.
Don't hold your breath waiting to hear any of this on your Evening Corporate News.
I followed the links to Max Fisher's graph and we were at our worst during the Bush Years
BUSH was a totalitarian ass! My day is made!!
Obama isn't as bad a BUSH! but much worse than many of our former Presidents - but GIVE ME THIS!!!
AHAhahahahahah Obama is BETTER than BUSH!!
Do not mind the weights or the metrics or source data used. Do not mind the actual list as in "who stands where". You can argue with all that.
But do note, no matter if that detail is questionable or this method is bad in your opinion or even plain wrong, that there *is* an actual problem.
wget https://rsf.org/index2014/data...
cat index2.csv|awk -F ";" '{print $3" "$2}'|sort -n
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Not that I'm totally happy with the situation, but I wonder if this story is a bit exaggerated. Reporters Without Borders says that they made changes to their methodology. Suddenly the U.S. drops in rank. I think those two facts are related.
Proverbs 21:19
So, press freedom in the US isn't really so bad, because the US has sometimes ranked higher? Even though it has never ranked above rank 20 or so? Is place 20 something to be pround of for the "land of the free"?
Read the report. It's not only about government abuse, which is bad enough, but also includes other factors. "Self-censorship" is a big one, for example, because of factors like "political correctness" (can't criticize minorities, don't dare offend the Christian right, etc.) and fear of lawsuits. However, the government abuses are already bad enough: metadata gathering, collecting specific phone records without warrants, etc.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
U-S-A! U-S-A! Top 50 for over a decade! (That's called "spin" and most of these journalists are abundantly familiar with the concept)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXWTdTnhebs
Whose dick the UK is sucking to stay so highly as a "democratic" or "free" country. (Esp. on the Wikipedia page or Reporters Without Borders?)
That hasn't been the case for a fucking while now.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
I'm not as convinced as many people are that the sky is falling, so I suspect the economy will eventually improve.
The thing that all the knee jerk poster here seemed to miss is that this is the first year on a totally different survey methodology.
Reporters Sans Borders (RSF) totally tossed out their prior methodology and went with a new questionnaire: http://rsf.org/index/qEN.html
Since this isn't the only source of input, you have to read also their methodology
which includes things never before even considered. It turns out that most of the qualitative measurements are done by RSF people themselves, rather than from input from these people in the field.
Quantitative questions about the number of violations of different kinds are
handled by our staff. They include the number of journalists, media assistants and netizens who
were jailed or killed in the connection with their activities,
So "netizens" are who exactly?
And why does that matter? Well, since they don't define it, we have to assume that anyone releasing information
over the internet counts as a netizen. So one Bradley Manning (35 year sentence) can account for 90% of the "Violence against reporters/netizens) score.
North Korea, not having any Netizens, presumably gets a perfect score in this regard. I suggest the whole thing is hopelessly biased.
As with any newly invented scale, you have to give it a few years for the truth (and the bias) to come out.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
But some are more free than others.
So many similarities between North Korea and North American USA. Unite finally.
After looking at their methodology, the list is rather meaningless.
...anything ranks lower than DPRK
You make a good point, but this list is not about free speech. Clearly, in for example Sweden, there is nothing like free speech.
So if you write racist and anti-gay rants, you will be sued and you will have to pay fines of typically 30.000 USD (for Sweden). In Sweden, this means that sites like Slashdot do not exist because of the liability.
However, this list is about journalism, and those guys typically do not write texts that are not protected as free speech in Europe.
It is a subtle but important distinction.
There is no comparison between the newspaper that breaks a story and newspapers that are copy cats.
If US newspapers would not relay what the Guardian wrote, it would be at position 100, not 46.
It's all Bush's fault!
I know, I, know, he hasn't been in office for over 5 years now, but that doesn't stop the current administration form blaming everything else on him!
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
The rebuttal is garbage.
True, the stats jump up and down, and there should probably be a damping factor, or the data should be given with margins of error.
The argument that relative placements are not important is garbage. True, absolute numbers are interesting, but relative placements are equally important.
The only argument to be held against this list is that relative placements, taking into account margins of error would lead to less change.
But the US is still shockingly far down on the list. That is the main message.
the race to the bottom. Go US! Go .....
What you are saying is wrong.
Yes, those factors can be weighted in a sound and scientific manner.
You repeatedly give 100 "average" journalists (sampled from a representative population) the task of ranking whether country A is better than country B.
This gives you several thousand pairwise judgements by professionals. You then crunch these numbers using for example principal component analysis to get the underlying weights the professionals gave to the individual factors.
This can again be used to reconstruct the individual scores for the countries.
"manufactured controversy"? Are you paid to say that?
When one bothers to actually look at the data, the rank for the United States is still higher than its ranking in 2006, 2007 and 2011. Since 2002, the United States press freedom has bounced back and forth between the 20s and 50s. This is not to say that there isn't merit to the deficits in press freedom that Reporters Without Borders points out; there are very legitimate concerns being raised about recent efforts by the current administration to crack down on leakers and whistleblowers. Yet because Reporters Without Borders is regularly changing their methodology, you can't really use the data to make a true comparison of any nation's change in rank beyond very broad generalizations. Here's a good story in the Washington Post that makes this point.
The truth behind Watergate was the 1970s energy crisis. Normally, the United States is a tight oligarchy that will never show it's true corruption. However, the fuel crisis destabilized the factions since it seemed like there's a real threat to the people at power. So, they turned against each other, fighting for scraps, while some Journalist was lucky enough to get caught in the middle.
One kind: they wrap themselves in the flag. My country, right or wrong. God bless my country. Your complaints are invalid. My country is and always has been perfect.
The other kind: we all have flaws. Let us seek out the flaws, admit to them, and fix them. Let us constantly strive to improve.
These threads always make it clear who is in which camp.
.. and get carbombed. e.g. Michael Hastings.
The xenophobic attitude pervasive in DHS/NSA/FBI is unmitigated and growing with each administration.
Congratulations terrorists, you've won.
Hell - they're still using the METRIC system FFS!!
If there's anything to this, then IMHO, the American press is its own worst enemy by placing ideology above objectivity.
Without passing judgement on the ratings, why doesn't a country like Afghanistan or Iraq strive to beat the US in ratings like these? God knows they could easily do it.
Yes, God knows they could easily commit sin. A lot of majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East have state-sponsored "establishment of religion" (as my country's constitution calls it) and otherwise restrict "free exercise thereof". In those countries, if press freedom contravenes leaders' interpretation of the Qur'an, leaders' interpretation of the Qur'an wins.
Always have redress in court... unless they assassinate you (by drone or other tool), or throw you in an overseas prison without access to a lawyer (hey, you just admitted that the government doesn't always grant its people their constitutional rights), or any of a number of other ways they have of making you go away. As for presumption of innocence, that's the second most blatant bullshit in your post (after "*always* have redress"); the government has acted from day one under the assumption that he's guilty. How the hell do you expect him to get a fair trial in those circumstances?
Oh, and as for the "way too many people watching" argument, did you miss the part where this whole thing started because of the government "trying something" and telling the only people in a position to catch them at it that it was illegal to say anything? How the hell are we going to know if the government "tries anything" unless somebody else blows the whistle on it? It's not like they'll do it in public... and if I were Snowden, I sure as fuck wouldn't trust somebody else to become a whistleblower on my behalf having just witnessed the way to government is treating whistleblowers these days. Nope, the only thing we know is that a very substantial part of the administration has already said that they consider him guilty, and the NSA has every reason to see him discredited and removed, and they routinely operate without proper oversight and have all the tools they need to see somebody found guilty. Hell, the fact that they were doing that (quite thoroughly without due process) is part of what led to Snowden's whistleblowing in the first place! You really think they'd keep their hands out of it, this time?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
True that. One wonders how the fuck they're still posting at 1... moderators must be taking extra-strength stupid pills today.
Moving the fenceposts, check: several times, ranging from "evidence he would be mistreated" to "who is being detained without charges?" to "nobody wants him" to "but the BBC doesn't dictate our policy" (why the fuck does that matter, when - according to you - the problem is that we don't have any option of where to put this person?)... the blatancy of the bullshit is incredible.
Standard troll tactic of repeating the same line over and over again, check: the whole "GITMO is *bad* ... but there's no solutions" refrain while continuously ignoring the solutions people are offering. The failure to read the link is sadly typical, the repeating that little line of bullshit as its arguments are systematically dismantled is just an insult, the kind a five your old losing an argument resorts to.
Then there's the final claim, that "just because the US government is demonstrably mistreating people all the time, constantly, and has been doing so for over a decade... well, that's no reason to believe it would mistreat somebody is has already denied the presumption of innocence to!"
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Heck, Illinois and Chicago are bankrupt. Illinois, run be Democrats for the last 100 years but had a few GOP governors swimming upstream, has the worst bond rating in the country. The Univ of Illinois has research showing Chicago as the most politically corrupt city in the nation. The Illinois media has been supporting Democrat Corruption for 100 years. The state is screwed. Chicago is screwed. Could Illinois look like Detroit? The Illinois media fails to headline the political crisis as a Democrat Problem! They fear Obama, Durbin, Madigan, Cullerton, and Emanuel. Tell the TRUTH and the Democrats will attack you and your business with Government Coercion. Obama uses his IRS and DOJ and NSA to attack political opponents. The Illinois media fears Obama!
murrica!
Let's be honest now: Before we "butchered" them, they were quite often busily "butchering" each other. Wars between tribes were brutal and final.
That's the way land acquisition often works: A stronger force asserts a claim, and the land becomes theirs via a warlike exercise of that strength. Pretty much everyone behaves the same, historically speaking.
If the conquered people are lucky, they get assimilated. If not... well, suffice to say it's better to be assimilated if you want your genetics to be anything more than a footnote in some dusty tome.
When the people who want someone dead are the ones writing the law, claiming that what they do is "totally legal and within the bounds of the law" means absolutely nothing.
Everything Saddam Hussein did was totally legal and within the bounds of the law.
Well, the Fox News crowd is one only crowd I hear yelling about a president and government that constantly LIES in your face. A president who continually ignores the constitution to push his and YOUR liberal agenda. A president who spends more money on vacations than the people he hates will ever earn in their lifetime. And if the president and Democrats are so concerned about the poor why do they do nothing about unemployment except to drive more people out of the workforce and into poverty thus needing the government care they keep railing for? Hmmmm mister can
't wait til the Fox News crowd dies???? It's haters like you that are driving this country into the ground.
You know the deal in Russia and other parts of the world one has to have papers to travel and show papers to cross boarders, living in America we're smug in the fact were free to travel where ever we want, whenever we want. Which many do in fact still believe . Any time, any where in the US anybody can be pulled over and required to produce their papers (being at the least a license or it's alternative. If your found without one can be jailed or less that X amount of monies (differs in each area) you can be jailed for vagrancy.
You don't even need to of done anything wrong, Any time, any where in the US anybody can be pulled over for a safety check.
Growing up the computer chips were as well, We used to be told what they could do for us, Now they are a reality and it's what it can do against us that's become the concern.
This isn't funny. The US is still free despite our speeding toward socialism as our current regime completely ignores rules of law. Your tired rhetoric about CEO's or the rich shows just how ignorant you are in your understanding of the real world. The only thing separating rich from poor today is confidence in the system. The fact that both rich and poor are still investing, working and going about their daily business shows that we still believe in the system. The alternative isn't pretty and probably means a collapse of our infrastructure. At that point suddenly a food cache becomes wealth and all the walls and expensive shit won't be worth a damn if you're hungry.
As in "Free Speech is exactly what US law/constitution covers, no more, no less". That, however, is like specifying a word processor must produce accurate documents, (defining accurate as "what Word 2010 produces on that machine").
They must have took Michael Hastings into consideration.
What happend to that story he was working on?
His girlfriend was going to publish it... Been almost a year, where is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)/
This "list" seems to be convinced that you could get a contract government job in (France? Britain? Germany? Some other much-adored European country) and steal state secrets, release them, and not be tracked down and arrested.
I for one think someone should test this theory. Do it, see what happens.
Really this entire article is just flamebait for anti-American Europeans, and _especially_ for self-loathing Americans with pathological inferiority complexes.
gosgog:
Where have so many of our best Investigative reporters gone (cause our Big business Press says the are expensive?)... AL JAZEERA THAT'S WHERE!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Casteism