After Media's OWS Arrests, U.S. Plummets In Press Freedom Index

(Occupy Wall Street)

Reporters Without Borders has released their annual Press Freedom Index cataloguing the most and least-journalism friendly countries in the world, and the United States dropped 27 places, to #47. According to the report, the U.S. "owed its fall of 27 places to the many arrests of journalist [sic] covering Occupy Wall Street protests." Wait, we didn't see anything of that nature happening!

The biggest shifts on the list were reflected in the coverage of the Arab Spring, with Tunisia rising 30 spots and Bahrain tumbling 29. Syria "fell further in the index…because total censorship, widespread surveillance, indiscriminate violence and government manipulation made it impossible for journalists to work."

Finland was #1, and North Korea and Eritrea were the least press-friendly countries, which strikes us as strange given that "Kim Jong-Il invented the hamburger" scoop that came out of North Korea.

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By Christopher Robbins in News on January 25, 2012 3:10 PM

Comments [rss]

Samantha Nicholson

THE WORLD IS WATCHING!!

uh, don't flatter yourselves OWS.

bggb

Hey it's the OWS troll!

How you been!?

whitecastlerock

Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!

knayte

Meh, the reasoning behind these rankings is pretty arbitrary.

bggb

I don't think arbitrary means what you think it means.

Fran MercantiAnthony

"A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad." ~Albert Camus

Roger_the_Shrubber

Chris Hedges a Pulitzer winner and former NY Times correspondent is suing the government over the NDAA... it screws journalists as much as anyone else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Stanley Rogouski

In before the first troll.

Between falling to number 47 on the Reporters Without Borders index for press freedom and the revelations that Ray Kelly forced NYPD recruits to watch Islamophobic propaganda put out by neoconservative extremists, can we say "banana republic" yet.

What "reporters without borders" doesn't mention, of course, is that the editorial pages of Daily News and the NY Post were shrieking for weeks in favor of a violent crackdown against OWS and then failed to say very much when their own freelancers and reporters got caught in that very crackdown they were calling for.