Rankings Offer Dismal Snapshot Of Train Wreck

Michael Hedges April 20, 2021 - Follow on Twitter

News organizations adore numbers. From election polls and results to sports scores, TV ratings and the Dow Jones Industrial Averages data is big, just following silly animal videos and gruesome crime scene photos. People like winners. Reporters like losers. Editors like pictures. There are courses and conferences on data journalism. Words cannot describe this, which is the point.

Notoriously blunt press freedom advocate Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF) released (April 20) its 2021 World Press Freedom Index ranking 180 countries on the free flow of information. Like everything else in the last year the results are inextricably tied to the coronavirus; infection rates and vaccination rates to protests and conspiracy theories. Grim stuff; and so is the 2021 RSF Press Freedom Index.

“Journalism is the best vaccine against disinformation,” said RSF secretary general Christophe Deloire in the preface. “Unfortunately, its production and distribution are too often blocked by political, economic, technological and, sometimes, even cultural factors. In response to the virality of disinformation across borders, on digital platforms and via social media, journalism provides the most effective means of ensuring that public debate is based on a diverse range of established facts.”

The RSF Press Freedom Index has been compiled for nearly two decades. The 2021 report has, arguably, received more attention from news organizations than in the past. Some of it feels like the coverage of an awful train crash.

There are exceptions. “Norway still the best at press freedom,” headlined journalisten.no (April 20). It could have been a cut-and-paste from last year, or the year before, or the year before that. Norway has topped the RSF Press Freedom Index since 2017. Finland was second, followed by Denmark, Sweden and Costa Rica. RSF clustered the top 12 countries as “good.” Other countries at the head of the pack include, in order, the Netherlands, Jamaica, New Zealand, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium and Ireland.

Germany fell out of that group, dropping to 13th from 11th. “Due to the many attacks on (coronavirus) demonstrations we had to downgrade the press freedom situation in Germany from good to only satisfactory,” said RSF German spokesperson Michael Rediske quoted by Horizont (April 20). “Germany is falling behind,” headlined Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) (April 20). “This has to do with the violence at the Querdenker (lateral-thinker) demonstrations.” German Journalists Association (DJV) federal chairman Frank Überall, quoted by Tagesspiegel (April 20), added “If the important fundamental right of freedom of the press and freedom of expression is increasingly restricted, we have a massive problem in Germany.” Police in Germany “do not always have protecting the rights of journalists in mind,” said RSF Germany executive director Christian Mihr to regional public radio channel Bayern 2 (April 20).

Elsewhere in Europe country rankings were either stuck or moving in the wrong direction. Two exceptions: Croatia bumped up three spots to 56th and the UK, no longer in the European Union, rose two places to 33th. Greece dropped to 70th from 65th one year on, assaults on journalists to blame. The quite distressed Greek professional editors journal EFSYN (April 20) noted that “media critical of the government have either been forgotten or received a disproportionately small share of the advertising resulting from a controversial €20 million information campaign.”

The “illiberal” Hungary dropped to 92nd from 89th. Government spokesperson Zoltan Kovacs reacted, reported media portal media1.hu (April 20), by blaming George Soros. Poland was two spots lower at 64th. Last among European countries was, again, Bulgaria at 112th, between Brazil and Indonesia. Burundi, Sierra Leone and Mali significantly improved their rankings one year on. The United States moved from 45th to 44th place on the election of a new president.

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• Hot Topics - Press/Media Freedom

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