- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
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I am pretty sure their assessment of US press freedom is wrong. In my opinion, it should be ranked much lower than 57th. Perhaps their assessment is true when you consider the facts of the entire world situation, but media freedom and actual journalism feels pretty dead here.
It doesn’t feel like they are accounting for the entire breadth facts at hand here when it comes to industry/capital/political pressure on media bias/accuracy and their combined effects on reporting (or the lack thereof).
there’s only 71 democracies (counting flawed democracies such as the US) out of the ~170 in the world, per the democracy index. RSF assigns a lot of weight into how many reporters are killed in each country
Truly, thanks for your response - I understand now that it does seem to be one of the major factors that goes into their ranking.
I guess my problem is that I just feel like ranking press freedom is flawed when things are this fucked. Here in the US, whistleblowers are persecuted or killed, accurate and unbiased reporting of events feels like it almost never happens, omission of newsworthy events is rampant, an oligarch is directly controlling speech in their outlet, independent journalism is at the behest of a few corporations that have total control of the algorithms and the platforms that these journalists rely on, a couple corporations own the entirety of all mainstream media… I could go on, but I’d just be preaching to the choir in all likelihood.
I’m glad that the few (independent or otherwise) journalists aren’t dying in droves here. They just get fired or silenced through various mechanisms if they report on anything that goes against the grain.
it’s true, it’s desperately fucked knowing that these newspapers and institutions started indexes (the democracy index, the press freedom index, the human development index, Gini inequality…) in the 1990s-2000s, and at the time they, and maybe everyone who’s now over the age of 40, had this beautiful optimism that the world would continue to become more free and more equal and more righteous, only to hit this global collapse that we have awesome tools for objectively measuring and no hard or soft power to resist
100%. I’m hopeful that with increased awareness more people will wake up to the reality at hand and take action. There has to be a breaking point where people finally realize they are being manipulated to be polarized, outraged, fearful, hateful, etc. by an uncaring apparatus that just wants to maintain the status quo (or whatever their particular agenda is) and steal their attention, largely.
Estonia and Denmark straight up switched 2nd and 6th places. Good for Estonia. Sad for us Danes.
Be very careful on the northern hemisphere beyond 30°E
