[TteFAboB]

I've dug through that site some time ago.

I believe there is Nobel-syndrome present in their organization. That is, the message they want to pass is more important than the factual reality.

Since reality matters little, it doesn't matter how distorted your rank is. What matters is the number of incidents reported, they aren't really scaled or put into any perspective, so even national security doesn't matter. If we were back in WW2, they'd rank Germany above the USA since there were more newspapers in the USA than in Germany and they would be applying self-censorship. There would actually be no censorship in German newspapers, they would all be freely transmitting the reality, at least that's what they'd tell you.

Bolivia? Jamaica? Ghana? Mozambique? Serbia? It is clear that these rank above the US only because there aren't enough news being published about them.

The USA has lost rank due to the "Bush government", now, I'd like to see which journalist would feel safer speaking against the Bolivian government in Bolivia then. In case you don't know, one of Evo Morales campaign tricks was to incite and unleash attacks on the newspapers he didn't liked, now he has the entire executive branch at his will and has already applied the Trotsky directive: since Bolivia is poor alot of the existing advertisement money is in the hands of the government and state companies (I can't tell you the exact % without researching), Trotsky has said that the opposition in Russia would starve to death, since Morales has cut advertising on any critical newspaper, only by following the official propaganda guide-lines can newspapers and journalists survive. His energy minister who recently resigned because of his dissapointment with Morales unsatisfactory low level of radicalism was a journalist before becoming minister.

Are these things factored into the rank? It doesn't seem so. All that matters are confrontations with governments. But if so then these things can greatly affect confrontations with governments:

1. Who finances the existing newspapers obviously including advertisement? How much money and newspapers are in the hands of the state? If the journalists and the newspapers depend on the state they will not criticize the government nor the state. This fact has a greater effect on the ranking because if the state controls newspapers by financial depedency then there will be no bad news published about confrontations with the government and thus the main ingredient to measure the ranking is missing - if there are no news about such confrontations possibly because there are no confrontations at all you probably won't loose rank. Only because the press is free in the US and consider itself safe to dig deep do they end up confronting the US government.

2. How many newspapers exist and how diverse are they? What is their editorial line? The newspaper may not be owned nor depend on the state, but what if the owner does? What if the owner is receiving money from the government or from the political party on power or from a syndicate/union and thus avoids criticizing and investigating the government? What if the journalists are also on an extra pay roll? How many newspapers are actually investigating anything at all? Does any of this counts? There are alot more newspapers in the USA investigating the "Bush government" than Bolivian newspapers investigating the Morales government, yet somehow this is a sign of less freedom of the press or doesn't matter at all.

3. The government doesn't have to be direct, controlling or owning anybody, but can use fear instead: how often and how many journalists are assassinated, die in car "accidents", dissappear, etc. after publishing something the government/political party/etc didn't liked? How many of these cases, if any, are solved? Do "N"GOs, social movements, party movements, gangs, angry mobs, etc, put pressure or threaten journalists or newspapers? Example: the Netherlands are put on top. I ask, do Dutch journalists feel more free and less constrained by Political Correctness than Americans to write about Islam and Muslims?

4. And finally the law: how many councils, boards, judges, courts, etc. apply censorship? When, how often and about what? How easy or difficult is it to become a journalist? How much can it cost on lawsuits not only from governments but from members of political parties too (this is very important as it is a great disguise)? How easy or difficult is it to start, print and run a newspaper, magazine, blog?

In summary this rank is an abberation because it measures the amount of cases of confronts with governments, not any level of freedom of the press, as such confronts can actually be a sign of the presence of freedom of the press and not its lack. There is an apex, somewhere to the bottom of the list, where it starts loosing any accuracy and becomes based solely on the amount of cases being published and confrontations and not the reality infact. Just answer: do you feel safer to investigate and criticize the Bush government or the Morales government? Of course, there is no merit in this as anybody can point the absence of freedom of the press in Cuba and North Korea easily.

This may be a good site to keep yourself updated on such confrontational cases, but trying to make a rank out of them is doomed to failure when translating it back to reality. Myself, I don't think I am so much more free in Hungary than Australia.