Based on the antics of the sectarian politicians who appointed them and militias which operate these facilities, for starters. Overcounting, undercounting and mis-attributing based on whatever political points can be scored at any given moment against their sectarian enemies.
It appears that the Iraqi Health Ministry was headed by those loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, which therefore implies that they would have an incentive to overcount the numbers of dead, if we were to accept your argument.
Again, who does?
Whoever is hired to do so. In the case of reports by the Los Angeles Times, their Iraq correspondents did. One of them was interviewed here.
And I do notice your attempts to dodge my points about the geographical distribution and the sheer numbers of cementeries versus the available "checkers" in this methodology, as well as the attribution of causes of death, particularly when delayed or if caused by war-time hardships versus actual bullet wounds.
Those doing the checking probably use some form of sampling, or go to a central source, such as figures from the government. They don't just use counts from cemeteries, they also go to morgues, hospitals and health officials.
Your desperation to discount casualties of war reminds me of the equally reliable method the US forces have been using recently, whereby they count the dead based on the entry points of their bullet holes...
Oh for fuck's sake, here is a O'Reilly's quote on the Fallujah assault I found in literally 30 seconds flat: "Problems continue for the U.S. Military in Fallujah. Why doesn't the U.S. Military just go ahead and level it?".
The US military has leveled cities before for far less.
His great concern about the civilian population is just oozing from that statement! There are many more where that came from and no, I am not going to be your search engine.
You're the one making the assertion, therefore it is up to you to back it up.
Its also easy to undertand the overall tone and attitude of these pundit's messages.
So give us some examples.
Next you are going to pretend that they are "fair and balanced" at which point your credibility would reach absolute zero, if it weren't already there for a long time.
What motivation would I have for saying they are "fair and balanced"? What does that have to do with anything?
So the Hutu RTLM radio advocated war on the Tutsis and called then "cockroaches". Big deal. Right? RIGHT?!
That is a lunatic comparison. The Tutsis weren't cutting people's throats, blowing up civilians and flying planes into skyscrapers.
You are making me laugh at your stupidity. Since Media Matters provides whole sections of O'Reilly's ramblings verbatim, complete with transcripts and audio or video, the only conculsion one can draw from your inane demand is that by "accurate, in-context" you mean either entire shows and radio programs or, more likely, your fantasies in which whatever the voices in your head tell you is always "in-context and accurate", without any actual relationship to recorded data in this universe. You are just a classic delusional loon long separated from reality.
Media Matters has taken statements out of context before. The vast majority of their site is nothing more than nitpicking and left-wing whining about statements that are "controversial" only in their own heads, statements that ordinary Americans generally don't care about.
As to "mudslingers", all the "mud" which is "slung" on
I said 'accurate, in-context quotes', not handwringing by professional mudslingers. They don't even have anything quoting him on Iraq on the page you reference.
Search under "shock and awe".
A Google search under '"shock and awe" O'Reilly civilians' did not return anything that supports your claims.
He (and his fellow demagouges all over the media) constantly insinuate all of this, although even they are not bold enough to actually use these terms directly, as is the case with many other propagandists advocating violence under the guise of "justice" or "peace".
It's easy to say they "insinuate", without having to provide actual proof that they do.
No, he did advocate, and still does, warfare with "Islamofascists" (the actual ridiculous term he uses)
So O'Reilly advocates war on Islamic militants, and calls them 'Islamofascists'. Big deal.
whom he claimed Saddam was in cahoots with (amongst many, many other lies and distortions) and war on all those who refuse to submit to America-centric rule of "democracy", as defined by American and Zionist Neo-cons. Not to mention his anti-Islam innuendo
Such as?
(which alone is a dead giveway about his true ideas about the predominantly Muslim population of Iraq). The religion is different, the bloody results similar.
Also that "murderous totalitarian government" appears to have been no more murderous then the "liberators" and was at any rate less disastrous to the state of daily lives of average Iraqis. At the worst of Saddam times Baghdad at least had drinkable water and semi-operational sewage.
To say that Saddam was "no more murderous" than the US, you have to count all Iraqi civilians killed since the start of the war as having been "murdered" by the US, which I've already demonstrated as false.
Oh I see, so according to this logic the culpabilty for your actions always belongs to other people because no matter what you have done, they have free will! Thus you are automatically blameless for anything that happens as a result of your activities, even if the behaviour of those other people is easily predictable far in advance! How so very neo-conservative of you! I believe you call that idea "Personal Responsibility" and you cherish it very much.
Also, the entire point of religious brainwashing is to achieve the replacement of higher brain functions with uncritical religious zeal. One can easily see that this is true by a very simple test: all religious doctrines are patently absurd, irrational, internally inconsistent and lack any empircial evidence whatsoever, thus brain disfunction is a pre-requisite to acceptance of such dogmas. This makes the True Believer religious zealots of all stripes no more free willed (nor smarter) then the worms I mentioned.
Setting up strawmen just makes you look dumb.
I already explained that one has to take into account all studies as all their methodologies are prone to error and use an average of their results. You prefer to pretend that only the lowest
Really? A single newspaper, with at most a few freelance reporters working for it in the field performing an Iraq-wide "check" of morgues, hospitals and cementeries....
Also the UN has no presence in Iraq to speak of since the time their envoy got blown up. Their representatives get shot the moment they identify themselves as they are seen as complicit in bringing about the US invasion, which also presents some small difficulty in conducting Iraq-wide scans.
The UN collects its information from the Iraqi Health Ministry and the Medico-Legal Institute of Baghdad.
I do not doubt that some such attempts were made via hired third parties, but the reliability of this methodology is laughable even if they were conducted seriously. Many dead do not end up in any of those places as they are buried in family compounds and villages. Many others, specially the victims of US aerial and local's sucide bombardments, are not buried at all, since nothing is left to bury. Also one has to ask how would these intrepid "counters" distinguish graves of people dying of unrelated disease and old age from those dying from being shot or from malnutrition and disease brought by the US invasion, specially that the locals' families rarely would bring the victims to hospitals if they are obviously dead...
They no doubt ask either those at the cemetery, or the victims families.
If he only "reported", no one could make a viable charge against him. But you know as well as I do that his "advocacy" extended well beyond and above any impartial reporting. As a matter of fact it still does. He does precisely what the millitant Islamists' ideologues do, namely calls for murder via military aggression of those who would not submit to the ways of the Divenely Chosen, Always Right By Definition, Gloriously Supreme and Perpetually Unjustly Victimized America, as he interprets it for his followers.
If O'Reilly is such a monster, you should have no problem providing accurate, in-context quotes to prove it. O'Reilly never called for targeting civilians in Iraq, nor does he say that America is "Divenely Chosen", "Always Right By Definition", "Gloriously Supreme" or "Perpetually Unjustly Victimized". If O'Reilly advocated war with Iraq, he was advocating for the removal of a murderous totalitarian government, which is different from calling for the murder of people who refuse to submit to theocratic rule.
One example of his hate is the fact that he uses the term "Islamofascists" to describe his Militant Islamist enemies, a term specifically tailored to incite blind hate and having no historical accuracy whatsoever. And it is working because one can see in these threads a lot of his disciples demonstrating their fully effective, hateful brainwashing.
If you open a can of worms to get a gold coin within, worms which you knew were in it because you've been repeatedly told by many worm experts and people who have seen the worms being put in there and whose advice you dismissed sniggering contemptuously and subesquently if the worms escape to chew your carpet, whose fault is it? Yours or the worms'? And then if you proceed to burn your house down in an insane attempt to "fight" them, killing your grandma whom you forgot was sleeping upstairs, whose fault is it? Yours or the worms'?
The worms cannot be blamed because the worms do not have free will. Humans do have free will, and if they won't restrain themselves from behaving like sub-human savages, that's their own fault.
No, the reports are simply not to be trusted. That is why multiple, varying methodologies, deployed by multiple, varying organizations must be used and the results averaged. That is the only, even if remotely, scientific method of trying to eliminate noise in the data brought on b
The estimates conducted by various organizations and by various methodologies range from 70+ thousand (based only on media reports) to 1,2 million (based on various indirect population polling methods). The Lancet study stands at around 600,000 which is in mid-range of these studies.
Reports from those who looked at figures from morgues, hospitals and cemeteries, such as the UN and the Los Angeles Times, still don't give figures anywhere near 600,000.
O'Reilly and many other media pundits were used by the planners of Iraqi invasion to uncritically disseminate and enhance their propaganda in order to shape the public opinion so that the invasion can be carried out. Every lie, exaggeration, mis-representation and innuendo deployed by the Iraqi war planners was presented as fact by O'Rilley and his co-bloviators to O'Reilly's already seriously brain-washed audience.
Reporting information is not incitement. Even if he did advocate war against the government of Iraq, there is no sane comparison to militant Islamists who call for the murder of those who refuse to submit to them.
Blaming the victims of the invasion for being "ungateful" and "unable to appreciate the great US sacrifice" is beyond riduculously hypocritical - it is the responsibility of high and mighty invaders to plan for such possibilities before hand.
That some in Iraq insist on behaving like sub-human savages is not the fault of the US, regardless of whether or not such behavior was foreseen.
The Western media has very limited access to the local affairs and its reporting relies on local, sectarian sources, of whom many also have been shot and imprisoned by the US in its Gulags for attemting to report on US and mercenary activities.
So basically according to you, news reports are to be dismissed because the reporters are either lying, or censored and tortured by the US.
There is a simple, logical test. If demagouges like O'Reilly would have not incited (with tacit help and approval of Imperial America Neocons and other lords of Disaster Capitalism) the invasion of Iraq, would these hundreds of thousands of deaths have occured, given the fact that Saddam did not manage to kill anywhere near as many of his countrymen during his 23 year long rule? It is a rather simple case of cause and effect. If that is a sign of "mental illness" than the you live in some Reverse Universe, where eating your own fecies is considered the utmost respectable mark of "sanity".
Your "test" is not logical, as it presupposes that there are "hundreds of thousands" of deaths, and that O'Reilly somehow "incited" the invasion of Iraq.
As far as Saddam Hussein is concerned, he is thought to have killed somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people during his reign.
Furthermore, it is incorrect to say that "most" are related to the religious and ethnic warfare, as an unknown percentage is a direct result of large scale and ongoing aerial bombardment, "anti-terrorist sweeps", "pre-emptive" murdrer of whole families at thousands of "checkpoints" and in any vehicle which gets "too close" to panicked US troops, opaque activities of vast mercenary armies, wholesale "pacification" of whole cities like Fallujah to avenge the said mercenaries, not to mention an inderect result of complete (and purposeful, profit motivated) destruction of the Iraqi civilian infrastructure.
According to "Iraq Body Count", between 76,352 and 83,175 have been killed since the beginning of the war. Upon further examination of the news reports they cite, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of killings are done by Muslims targeting other Muslims.
with hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq alone in a period of 4 years.
Since these "hundreds of thousands of casualties" are mainly Muslims blowing up other Muslims, your blaming O'Reilly for their deaths is a sign of mental illness, not even including your other deranged statements.
plain and neat. It is for ensuring nobody gets the nation in their grip by grabbing them on all fronts of media. Like hearst and so on in the past.
Nobody prevents you from starting your own newspaper, and the only reason it's hard for the average person to broadcast over-the-air is because the government created an artificial scarcity by regulating and licensing access to the airwaves.
Laws that ban people from owning different types of media outlets serve to suppress freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
And the women and children in the tent cities that were shot up, knocked down and set on fire, what horrible sins had they committed?
In the case of the Ludlow Massacre, the women and children were in a camp that had been set up near the mouth of a canyon leading to the coal camps for the purpose of harassing replacement workers. They suffocated in a pit beneath a tent when the tent was set on fire.
There was a time when the U.S. didn't have this, or not much: then, we had child labor, 14-hour workdays, and company cops to bust your head if you complained.
The only time company cops were called in to "bust heads" was when strikers were beating and murdering replacement workers, or blockading company premises.
Thank you for your contribution, especially since all those stupid die-hard communists seem to think infant mortality in Cuba is less than that of the US.
The CIA merely regurgitates that which is pulled from Castro's ass. No doubt the statistics are as reliable as the statistics the CIA published for the USSR, which turned out to be not very reliable at all.
CIA factbook (obviously a commie liberal tool, right?)
The CIA Factbook has always published absurdly improbable statistics for places like Cuba and North Korea. They did the same with statistics from the USSR, which were later proven to be wildly false.
"Historians with an ideological axe to grind against the market usually ignore an authoritative 1906 report of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Husbandry. Its investigators provided a point-by-point refutation of the worst of Sinclair's allegations, some of which they labeled as 'willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,' 'atrocious exaggeration,' and 'not at all characteristic.'"
It's kind of hard to collect taxes without the threat of being confronted by them.
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. Takes care of the "Christian" part.
Not according to the original poster. He's the one who brought government into the picture and associated a socialized system with being synonymous with "Christian values".
How does this tie in, except in Canada? Has anyone in the US called for that?
If you want to argue that development only comes by way of capitalism and free markets then you have to completely ignore the fastest technologically advancing societies ever documented. Those are, Atlantis (all be it unprovable), and The Soviet Union, clearly proven.
The only technological advancements in the Soviet Union that wasn't a Potemkin Village of some sort were those things designed to kill and destroy, mainly guns and rocket engines. Even those were eventually overtaken by smaller and smarter U.S. weapons whose developers had civilian technology to leech off of.
Face it: Despite its lip service to christian values, the US is one of the coldest, inhumane countries on this planet, were cristian values are preached but not practised at all.
And heavily-armed tax collectors coercing money from people upon penalty of imprisonment or death is "warm", "humane" and "Christian"?
Is it more "warm", "humane" and "Christian" when the State goes a step further and bans private health care altogether, as is the case in Canada?
Communism isn't a bad thing, infact as children as are taught communism ideals. "Play fair and share" is the basis of Communism and we teach this to children from day one. If you think communism is some how a bad thing I suggest you look up what communism is, because it isn't a small group of people hording everything and leaving nothing for everyone under them to share.
Karl Marx intended communism as a totalitarian terror state. That's precisely what occurred in practice, along with savage inequalities in wealth and power.
McCarthy victims: "The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.[42] In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.[43] (...) Suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism. According to some scholars, this resulted in more persecutions than did alleged connection with Communism"
Reagan victims: The Contra part of the Iran-Contra affair was particularly ugly. It is easy to point fingers when one ignores that the very history of the United States is filled with prejudice, segregation and selective rights. It is easy to call themselves the "land of free" as long as you are not Native American or Black or Woman or Communist or Latin, or Arab or Muslim.
Yet more disgusting equivocations from the leftists on Slashdot.
The Wikipedia article greatly overstates the number of people left without jobs under McCarthyism; only a few dozen wealthy and powerful communists lost their jobs, and were left as free to espouse their beliefs as before.
As for your other paragraph, compare living as a "Native American or Black or Woman or Communist or Latin, or Arab or Muslim" in America with living as a Native American under the Sandinistas, a Black in Cuba, or an Arab or Muslim under one of their own regimes.
Karl Marx's vision was of communism being imposed by a totalitarian terror state. The USSR was a totalitarian terror state, and was supported by Western leftists as a wonderful example of socialism in action.
French law prohibits public speech or writings that incite to racial or religious hatred, as well as those that deny the Jewish Holocaust. Proponents and supporters of these measures allege that they fight against the spread of neo-nazi ideas and a climate of racism; opponents contend that these laws stifle the freedom of speech in France, and make it difficult to engage in the criticism of the practices of some religions, or in the discussion of immigration. The only major party opposed to those laws are the National Front whose leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been a target of them.
In December 2004, a controversial addition was made to the law, criminalizing the prohibition to hatred or violence against people because of their sexual orientation. A law voted on 31 December 1970 created article L. 630 (renamed L. 3421-4) of the Public Health Code, which punishes the "positive presentation of drugs" and the "incitement to their consumption" with up to five years in prison and fines up to 76,000. Newspapers such as Libération and Charlie Hebdo, book shops, associations, political parties, music bands, and various publications criticizing the current drug laws and advocating drug reform in France have been repeatedly hit with heavy fines based on this law.
Restrictions: The law in France as part of "internal security" enactments passed in 2003 makes it an offense to insult the national flag or anthem, with a penalty of a maximum 9,000 euro fine or up to six months' imprisonment. Restrictions on "offending the dignity of the republic," on the other hand, include "insulting" anyone who serves the public (potentially magistrates, police, firefighters, teachers and even bus conductors). The legislation reflects the debate that raged after incidents such as the booing of the "La Marseillaise" at a France vs. Algeria football match in 2002.
This is just boilerplate stuff though. How much criticism of France do we see in French media that are equally as intense as the criticisms of America that we see in the American media?
If France doesn't value freedom of speech as much as America, then tell my why the Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index for 2006 rated America behind France in terms of freedom of the press?
Probably because the "Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index" is bullshit, perhaps ranking only to what extent the press is censored into agreeing with "Reporters Without Borders".
No legitimate report on press freedom lists France ahead of America.
Slashdot Mirror
It appears that the Iraqi Health Ministry was headed by those loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, which therefore implies that they would have an incentive to overcount the numbers of dead, if we were to accept your argument.
Whoever is hired to do so. In the case of reports by the Los Angeles Times, their Iraq correspondents did. One of them was interviewed here.
Those doing the checking probably use some form of sampling, or go to a central source, such as figures from the government. They don't just use counts from cemeteries, they also go to morgues, hospitals and health officials.
The US military has leveled cities before for far less.
You're the one making the assertion, therefore it is up to you to back it up.
So give us some examples.
What motivation would I have for saying they are "fair and balanced"? What does that have to do with anything?
That is a lunatic comparison. The Tutsis weren't cutting people's throats, blowing up civilians and flying planes into skyscrapers.
Media Matters has taken statements out of context before. The vast majority of their site is nothing more than nitpicking and left-wing whining about statements that are "controversial" only in their own heads, statements that ordinary Americans generally don't care about.
Based on analysis from who? If this is true, to which sect are they loyal? And are they overcounting or undercounting the number of dead bodies?
They go to the cemetery, look for graves made after 2003, and then ask how they died.
I said 'accurate, in-context quotes', not handwringing by professional mudslingers. They don't even have anything quoting him on Iraq on the page you reference.
A Google search under '"shock and awe" O'Reilly civilians' did not return anything that supports your claims.
It's easy to say they "insinuate", without having to provide actual proof that they do.
So O'Reilly advocates war on Islamic militants, and calls them 'Islamofascists'. Big deal.
Such as?
To say that Saddam was "no more murderous" than the US, you have to count all Iraqi civilians killed since the start of the war as having been "murdered" by the US, which I've already demonstrated as false.
Setting up strawmen just makes you look dumb.
The UN collects its information from the Iraqi Health Ministry and the Medico-Legal Institute of Baghdad.
They no doubt ask either those at the cemetery, or the victims families.
If O'Reilly is such a monster, you should have no problem providing accurate, in-context quotes to prove it. O'Reilly never called for targeting civilians in Iraq, nor does he say that America is "Divenely Chosen", "Always Right By Definition", "Gloriously Supreme" or "Perpetually Unjustly Victimized". If O'Reilly advocated war with Iraq, he was advocating for the removal of a murderous totalitarian government, which is different from calling for the murder of people who refuse to submit to theocratic rule.
The worms cannot be blamed because the worms do not have free will. Humans do have free will, and if they won't restrain themselves from behaving like sub-human savages, that's their own fault.
Reports from those who looked at figures from morgues, hospitals and cemeteries, such as the UN and the Los Angeles Times, still don't give figures anywhere near 600,000.
Reporting information is not incitement. Even if he did advocate war against the government of Iraq, there is no sane comparison to militant Islamists who call for the murder of those who refuse to submit to them.
That some in Iraq insist on behaving like sub-human savages is not the fault of the US, regardless of whether or not such behavior was foreseen.
So basically according to you, news reports are to be dismissed because the reporters are either lying, or censored and tortured by the US.
Your "test" is not logical, as it presupposes that there are "hundreds of thousands" of deaths, and that O'Reilly somehow "incited" the invasion of Iraq.
As far as Saddam Hussein is concerned, he is thought to have killed somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people during his reign.
According to "Iraq Body Count", between 76,352 and 83,175 have been killed since the beginning of the war. Upon further examination of the news reports they cite, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of killings are done by Muslims targeting other Muslims.
Since these "hundreds of thousands of casualties" are mainly Muslims blowing up other Muslims, your blaming O'Reilly for their deaths is a sign of mental illness, not even including your other deranged statements.
Nobody prevents you from starting your own newspaper, and the only reason it's hard for the average person to broadcast over-the-air is because the government created an artificial scarcity by regulating and licensing access to the airwaves.
Laws that ban people from owning different types of media outlets serve to suppress freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Government creating an artificial scarcity and controlling content and ownership through licensing is a "hands off approach"?
In the case of the Ludlow Massacre, the women and children were in a camp that had been set up near the mouth of a canyon leading to the coal camps for the purpose of harassing replacement workers. They suffocated in a pit beneath a tent when the tent was set on fire.
The only time company cops were called in to "bust heads" was when strikers were beating and murdering replacement workers, or blockading company premises.
Stop lying.
Chomsky is a totalitarian and a liar. Nothing he says can be believed.
The CIA merely regurgitates that which is pulled from Castro's ass. No doubt the statistics are as reliable as the statistics the CIA published for the USSR, which turned out to be not very reliable at all.
The CIA Factbook has always published absurdly improbable statistics for places like Cuba and North Korea. They did the same with statistics from the USSR, which were later proven to be wildly false.
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7229
"Historians with an ideological axe to grind against the market usually ignore an authoritative 1906 report of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Husbandry. Its investigators provided a point-by-point refutation of the worst of Sinclair's allegations, some of which they labeled as 'willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,' 'atrocious exaggeration,' and 'not at all characteristic.'"
...they would fertilize the oceans and switch to nuclear power.
Instead, they concentrate on smashing the US economy, which is where their true priorities lie.
It's kind of hard to collect taxes without the threat of being confronted by them.
Not according to the original poster. He's the one who brought government into the picture and associated a socialized system with being synonymous with "Christian values".
Physicians for a National Health Program seeks to establish a Canadian-style system in the U.S.
The only technological advancements in the Soviet Union that wasn't a Potemkin Village of some sort were those things designed to kill and destroy, mainly guns and rocket engines. Even those were eventually overtaken by smaller and smarter U.S. weapons whose developers had civilian technology to leech off of.
And heavily-armed tax collectors coercing money from people upon penalty of imprisonment or death is "warm", "humane" and "Christian"?
Is it more "warm", "humane" and "Christian" when the State goes a step further and bans private health care altogether, as is the case in Canada?
And we all know the myriad of human rights agencies that are permitted to operate in Cuba...
How many years have you been mentally ill?
I have about 110 million people who would disagree with you.
Karl Marx intended communism as a totalitarian terror state. That's precisely what occurred in practice, along with savage inequalities in wealth and power.
Yet more disgusting equivocations from the leftists on Slashdot.
The Wikipedia article greatly overstates the number of people left without jobs under McCarthyism; only a few dozen wealthy and powerful communists lost their jobs, and were left as free to espouse their beliefs as before.
As for your other paragraph, compare living as a "Native American or Black or Woman or Communist or Latin, or Arab or Muslim" in America with living as a Native American under the Sandinistas, a Black in Cuba, or an Arab or Muslim under one of their own regimes.
Karl Marx's vision was of communism being imposed by a totalitarian terror state. The USSR was a totalitarian terror state, and was supported by Western leftists as a wonderful example of socialism in action.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Fra nce:
French law prohibits public speech or writings that incite to racial or religious hatred, as well as those that deny the Jewish Holocaust. Proponents and supporters of these measures allege that they fight against the spread of neo-nazi ideas and a climate of racism; opponents contend that these laws stifle the freedom of speech in France, and make it difficult to engage in the criticism of the practices of some religions, or in the discussion of immigration. The only major party opposed to those laws are the National Front whose leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been a target of them.
In December 2004, a controversial addition was made to the law, criminalizing the prohibition to hatred or violence against people because of their sexual orientation. A law voted on 31 December 1970 created article L. 630 (renamed L. 3421-4) of the Public Health Code, which punishes the "positive presentation of drugs" and the "incitement to their consumption" with up to five years in prison and fines up to 76,000. Newspapers such as Libération and Charlie Hebdo, book shops, associations, political parties, music bands, and various publications criticizing the current drug laws and advocating drug reform in France have been repeatedly hit with heavy fines based on this law.
Restrictions: The law in France as part of "internal security" enactments passed in 2003 makes it an offense to insult the national flag or anthem, with a penalty of a maximum 9,000 euro fine or up to six months' imprisonment. Restrictions on "offending the dignity of the republic," on the other hand, include "insulting" anyone who serves the public (potentially magistrates, police, firefighters, teachers and even bus conductors). The legislation reflects the debate that raged after incidents such as the booing of the "La Marseillaise" at a France vs. Algeria football match in 2002.
This is just boilerplate stuff though. How much criticism of France do we see in French media that are equally as intense as the criticisms of America that we see in the American media?
Probably because the "Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index" is bullshit, perhaps ranking only to what extent the press is censored into agreeing with "Reporters Without Borders".
No legitimate report on press freedom lists France ahead of America.