- Image from Reporters Without Borders Report
Reporters Without Borders (RWB) just released its 2011 Press Freedom Index,and the results indicate it was a rough year for reporters. As RWB notes, “Many media paid dearly for their coverage of democratic aspirations or opposition movements. Control of news and information continued to tempt governments and to be a question of survival for totalitarian and repressive regimes. Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011.”
So how did world reporting fair in 2011? Unsurprisingly the biggest changes were a result of the democratic revolutions in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia; Japan dropped 11 spots because of the press crackdown following the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown; Chile fell 47 spots after the repression of student unrest; and the United States fell 27 spots because police arrested journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Canada took the 10th spot, and despite boasting the “top hemispheric ranking,” it is still far below the 5th place ranking the country occupied in 2002.
Overall, the report indicates that the countries most open to the media have changed slightly in the past decade, with Scandinavian countries dominating the top 5 positions. The dominance of Finland, Norway and Estonia in the rankings “serves as a reminder that media independence can only be maintained in strong democracies and that democracy needs media freedom.”
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