Congrats Everyone: U.S. Now Ranked 64th In Global Press Freedom
from the look-mom,-we're-stupid! dept
Good news if you really enjoy corporatism, autocracy, propaganda and a violently misinformed electorate!
The U.S. has fallen to sixty-fourth place (now below Ukraine) in the annual Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index. As corrupt, oligarch-coddled authoritarians the world over continue to enjoy their moment in the sun, journalism (aka the “enemy of the people”) continues to be violently disassembled by a lazy coalition of fascist ideology and corporatism.
From the latest report (see the full interactive index):
“For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low.”
The study notes that in 2002, 20% of the global population lived in a country where the state of press freedom was categorized as “good.” A quarter century later, less than 1% of the world’s population lives in a country that falls under this category.
In the U.S., Trump-friendly oligarchs like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are gobbling up the remnants of dying traditional media and newer social media platforms alike, keen on turning both into oligarch and autocrat friendly agitprop machines. All while Trump destroys whatever was left of public media, and endlessly harasses companies that platform basic journalism and comedy.
At the same time, journalism layoffs continue to be rampant at the hands of corporate media giants dead set on destroying whatever was left of media consolidation limits, public interest reporting, and even archival and journalistic history. The result is a lazy, ad-driven, badly automated engagement ouroborus where anything serving the public interest is a distant and fleeting consideration.
The better performers in the index include Norway, Finland (where they teach kids media literacy and how to identify propaganda starting at the age of three), Sweden, Denmark, and Estonia. While decidedly smaller with vast differences, such countries have strange perks like functional public media and an operational social safety net not yet hollowed out by grotesque levels of corruption.
From the study:
“In the United States (which ranks 64th out of 180 countries and territories) journalists who were already fighting against economic headwinds and dealing with a crisis of public trust—among other challenges—now also contend with President Donald Trump’s systematic weaponisation of state institutions, including funding cuts to public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS, political interference in media ownership, and politically motivated investigations targeting disfavoured journalists and media outlets.”
It can, of course, always get worse. Autocracies start by consolidating media and turning established outlets in to autocratic agitprop bullhorns, but ultimately move on to dominating or destroying whatever’s left of independent journalism through legal harassment and ultimately murder.
There are paths out from under this, but it requires a lot of coordinated efforts the U.S. has historically had an allergy to. Including restoring antitrust reform and imposing not just consolidation limits but diversity ownership requirements. It would also help to drive creative new funding models for journalism, dramatically reshape media literacy policy, and aggressively support real publicly-funded media freed from corporate influence, historically a close ally to maintaining a functioning democracy.
Filed Under: consolidation, free press, free speech, global press freedom, journalism, media, press, propaganda, reporting
Companies: reporters without borders
Comments on “Congrats Everyone: U.S. Now Ranked 64th In Global Press Freedom”
MAGA world
FREEDUMB!!
Fascists demand freedom of speech for themselves and only for themselves. If you’re not selective about what speech you support, you will quickly find that fascist speech has become the only speech.
This was the predictable end result of people fighting for the freedom of speech of fascists. Any other ideology you don’t agree with is fine and can be allowed to speak freely, but the central demand of the fascist ideology is inequality under the law.
They will take all of the freedom of speech you allow them, and apply it unequally.
If you want more freedom of speech, censor fascists. If you want more tolerance, do not tolerate fascists.
Fascists have already decided to break the societal contract. Do not extend it to them afterwards.
Such is life.
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And what would you suggest be done about the issue that is simultaneously possible, practical, ethical, and respectful of everyone else’s right to speak without government interference?
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To start with, reverse Citizen’s united.
From there? Respect people’s freedom to speak truth, but begin regulating hate speech and misinformation like Germany, France, and other countries who are clearly doing something right because they’re outperforming us on the freedom of expression index?
Hey, it turns out to maximize your freedom of expression, you need to regulate it some! Just like I’ve been saying! Wow!
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The big problem you have here is that the United States has the First Amendment and about two centuries’ worth of jurisprudence surrounding it. The slightly smaller problem is that you can’t regulate “hate speech” under the First Amendment because it will always create a bunch of rules-lawyering situations where someone will try to argue that, say, a Black person saying the N-word in any context, no matter which “version”, is “hate speech” because that word is widely recognized as a slur. How can you logically legislate hate speech in a way that allows only Black people to say that word while banning anyone who is not at least partially Black from saying it—i.e., how can you not eventually create the one-drop rule but for slurs? Seriously, would I not be able to identify as queer because some LGBTQ people still consider that a slur?
The few limits we have on speech only apply to a few distinct types of speech, and we can all agree that they’re reasonable limits. The problem in trying to regulate “hate speech” is that there is no reasonable limit or definition for that type of speech. What counts as “hate speech” will differ enough from person to person and have so many different contexts to worry about (e.g., the N-word situation I mentioned above) that there can’t be a consensus agreement on how to precisely legislate that speech. And that’s not getting into fucking Puritanical bullshit like trying to ban hate speech in media of all kinds, because…well, people have “cleaned up” Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn precisely to keep “hate speech” out of those books, so why wouldn’t similarly minded people try to do it to, I’unno, Pulp Fiction?
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There you go, putting hate speech in quotes again like the GOP does with climate change. Hate speech is a real thing with real harms that real people in real countries have crafted real laws on, in ways that have not caused the downfall of said nations.
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Imagine, if you will, two classrooms. In one, kids may say what they want and wear what they want.
In the other the teacher enforces a strict no bullying rule: Kids may wear they want and say what they want, but may not bully one another. Not by voice, not by writing, no way.
In the first classroom, the weird kids are bullied until they stop being weird.
In the other, the weird kids are allowed to be weird, and are not bullied for it, occasionally run afoul of the ‘no bullying’ rules because they’re dancing on the edge of what’s bullying or not, like pasting pictures of one particular kid sneezing on their shirt as a meme.
Which classroom has more freedom of expression? The one with all ‘normal’ students enforced internally by ruthless bullying, or the one where boys can wear unmanly things like dresses and hearts without being bullied?
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Cute analogy and all, but the thing is, what works in a classroom doesn’t necessarily work outside of one. Also: We do have a similar system out in the real world. If someone says something stupid, regardless of whether the place they say that stupid shit is privately or publicly owned, that someone can always suffer social consequences. That can mean anything from being banned from the property to getting their ass kicked (e.g., Dick Spencer; that one dude who got clocked with a Twisted Iced Tea can for saying the N-word). And that besides, how would you ever legislate against “bullying” without banning a wide swath of speech or creating an absurdly lengthy list of contexts where certain words, kinds of speech, and/or actions are “acceptable” under the law?
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And yet, what these other countries are doing which so much resembles this classroom… is working.
Otherwise why would they be higher in the index than us?
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On another article, Stephen said in response to me asking what he thinks about people leaving the country and never coming back rather than waiting for his fabled incrementalist changes to take place with “If I had the means, I’d probably join them. This place fucking sucks, my dude.”
I don’t believe him. It felt like he was trying to disarm my arguments with some attempt at humor (“You prolly never expected me to say this, did you?”) and he never answered my question about what he thinks about the people leaving. I don’t think Stephen could even imagine living in any functional democracy without his precious First Amendment, even if his quality of life would in-all-likelihood be objectively better.
So yeah, he probably thinks that the various indexes are fake news when they show that the U.S. is a shithole compared to other countries.
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Still would love an answer from Stephen: What is your opinion on marginalized groups leaving the United States for better countries and never coming back? Do you think they’re cowards?
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A system that doesn’t seem to have worked here in America when we just have that by itself, looking at who’s in the White House right now. So much of what Trump said on the campaign trail for 2016 and 2024, that tape that came out during the 2016 campaign where he talked about grabbing women, any of that would have been enough to end him if your system worked. It didn’t work.
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Usually it’s fascists embracing the paradox of tolerance, but here you are.
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Yeah, so, I embrace the idea that if I don’t protect the right of others to speak freely even (and especially) when they say heinous bullshit, my right to speak freely can get put on the chopping block and any defense I have will be undercut by my unwillingness to stand up for other people’s rights. That doesn’t require me to say “fascists should be allowed to preach on a street corner or in a public-facing business without social consequences”. If some asshole like Dick Spencer gets popped in the mouth for saying fascist bullshit, I won’t condone it, but I’ll probably have a laugh about it later on if it’s just the one shot.
Tolerance is a peace treaty. Fascists violate that treaty. I don’t condone or endorse political violence. That said: You don’t see me shedding tears over Charlie Kirk’s death, and when Trump finally dies (hopefully after suffering for hours due to the most painful heart attack in the history of mankind), I’ll be throwing a fucking pizza party for myself. I would advocate for fascists to receive the exact same treatment under the law, in all aspects, because anything less would be a demand for legal privileges based only on a political ideology. I hope you can understand why that might be a fucking problem if you expect the law to protect everyone equally.
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What would you? ’cause the current system, obviously, isn’t managing it either.
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I don’t have the resources, the intelligence, or the experience to make any suggestions that would fall under my criteria. It’s partly why I ask the question.
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Ok, but is the conclusion “so we should keep doing what we’re doing” if a proposal can’t satisfy all those criteria?
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No. No, it isn’t.
I’ve said before that shit has to change. Democrats, for example, must (metaphorically) stop pulling punches and (metaphorically) go for the fucking throat of the GOP whenever Dems have power. The whole point of building political capital and gaining political power is to use it, and most Dems seem so afraid of doing exactly that because they’re afraid to piss off right-wingers and pedophile billionaires. Getting the cowards out is a good start.
But as far as actual suggestions for anything the average person can do? I don’t really have much in that regard because, as I’ve said before, I’m just a dude with a laptop. I’m not a political organizer, I’m not a policy wonk, and I don’t have the resources, intelligence, and life experience necessary to be either of those things. That is, in part, why I ask for suggestions about things we can do that are “simultaneously possible, practical, and ethical”. The other reason I ask is to see if anyone can offer suggestions that don’t amount to authoritarian bullshit like censorship or violence.
Look, I have opinions—sometimes very, very strong ones. And I argue for them here because I have more issues than a Sports Illustrated archive. But I am not a particularly bright person when it comes to socializing and social change and anything like that. The best I can do here is argue against what I know I can’t support, like censorship and political violence. I can’t tell you what we should do to fix our bullshit any more than most people could. But I can still tell you what I won’t do.
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Okay, but the thing is, when someone does propose a change, you come out of your lair like an angry badger to talk about how that change is censorious and bad and will lead to terrible outcomes.
It makes it seem like you believe the current American situation to be the best free speech system around.
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Your self-deprecation (“I’m just a dude with a laptop! I don’t have any social skills or friends!”) to mask your love of the American speech status-quo and your fear of any change that might align us more with actual functioning liberal democracies, all while you ask other people to come up with thesis papers supporting their point of view, is getting really old.
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My self-deprication is to remind everyone who is trying to blame my stance on free speech for all the ills in the world that I’m not as powerful, smart, or resourceful as you want me to believe I am. Oh, my stance on free speech is destroying democracy? I don’t even talk with people outside of the Internet, and somehow I’m a bigger threat to the United States than Donald Trump? Bitch, please!
As for the whole “thesis papers” thing: I’m not asking you to write a whole-ass thesis. I’m asking you for an idea that is, as I’ve noted, simultaneously possible, practical, and ethical. That boils down to “no political violence and no going for people’s rights based only on who they are/what they say/what politicians they support” while also sticking to the guidelines of the Constitution. If you think making a suggestion that follows those guidelines requires a whole-ass essay, that’s on you.
I told you that I’m not intelligent or experienced enough to come up with ideas like that because it’s true. Sure, I get Insightful badges on this site on a semi-regular basis, but that doesn’t make me a seasoned political commentator or a legal scholar or a longtime policy wonk. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing half the time I’m awake. So yes, I’m asking you and anyone else for suggestions because while I can’t spell out the exact kind of law I would support in re: silencing bigots and fascists, I can tell you what kind of law I wouldn’t support.
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Lol. L-o-fucking-l. Everything you want that falls within the rules you want to impose on others on how to fight back is becoming rapidly unfeasible. Courts in states like Tennessee and Virginia are handing wins to Republicans after the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Jim Crow has returned. The federal gov’t also released a “counter-terrorism” strategy yesterday that looks like this.
But sure, keep on keepin’ on telling black people, trans people, and other marginalized groups who see where all this is going that they gotta fight back in a way that’s “correct” in your eyes. We aren’t simply No Kings Protesting and voting our way out of this one.
After all, just like those guys back in 2014, you think “it’s actually about ethics.”
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And when it becomes nigh impossible, I’ll listen to more extreme ideas with anything but skepticism. But I’m not an extremist, nor am I a pessimist. I also don’t believe our institutions will save us, so I’m open to ideas for how to save each other that don’t involve “hey, let’s silence people just because I don’t like what they say” or “hey, let’s put a bullet in someone’s head and hope that doesn’t have any wider repercussions down the line”. Nothing about this moment is good. But I’m not willing to toss in the towel and say “burn it all down”—not yet, anyway.
That’s not my place, nor would I dare to try. All I can tell you is that there are things I’m willing to support only in extremely dire circumstances and I believe we’re not entirely within those circumstances. If you still think I’m even remotely responsible for anything that happens in this world despite being a single person whose social presence can best be described as “who the fuck is this guy and why should we care about him”, feel free to keep coming for my throat. Hell, go look me up outside of this site and come for my throat there, too.
Christ, why do you fucking care so much about me? Do you want me to stop commenting here? Do you want to make my mental health that much worse than it already is? I am not that fucking important, I swear on my life. Fuck, man, I’m not an influencer or a lobbyist or a billionaire—I’m just a fucked up dude.
You know what? Fuck it. Tell me what to believe if that makes you happy. Go ahead, fuckin’ say what I should endorse, right now. It’s all you seem to want, and I’m done fighting it. Done fuckin’ trying to be a decent person who doesn’t want to hurt other people. Tell me who to be. Tell me what you want from me. Do it.
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For whatever it’s worth, I am genuinely sorry for pushing and needling and jabbing you all the way to this point. Seeing your most recent post here and over in the comments on the Soderburgh article, it did finally hit me how toxic I’ve been.
I have close friends that the current regime has in their sights. One of them is queer and Hispanic and lives here in Texas. I haven’t heard from them in a month despite trying to get in contact with them, and I fear the worst, that they either got arrested and tossed somewhere I’ll never see them again, or all the garbage happening got too much for them and they ended it.
I despise the laws, the precedents that have been set through court decisions, and the overall permissiveness for hate, that have led us to this current precipice.
I started being toxic and straight-up predatory to you well before that, though. You are just one guy, but your stance is emblematic of a larger group of ideas and principles that I see as an obstacle to justice. The American system placing the burden on marginalized groups who already have so much on their plates and more heaped on near-daily, to continue to have to debate and engage in bruising, scarring discourse about their right to exist and their self-determination, just to live their lives online and offline, is something that I fundamentally detest.
I focused my ire on you when I should have focused my ire on the ideas and people with more power and clout to spread those ideas far and wide. But those people with more power and clout are largely unreachable. So I went with getting into fights with you on here, which I realize now was a mistake.
What I’d like you to do, I suppose, is look at the power dynamics and the legal dynamics online and offline that leave the people targeted by fascists with little recourse outside of expensive, lengthy private lawsuits to try and hold said fascists accountable in more tangible ways than just interpersonal & social consequences. Think about how we can mend the system to where, for example, people with millions of followers online that post links & screenshots of drag shows and hospitals that offer gender-affirming care, knowing their followers will send bomb threats and more, those people can be held criminally accountable for intimidation and more. That’s all I feel I can ask after being such a scumbag.
Again, I am sorry. I will push myself to avoid Techdirt from here on out. This is my final post here. I’d also like to ask The Phule and others to lay off of you as well.
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I’m going to try (and fail) to keep this as short as I can because I’m still not in a good headspace right now, though it is slowly improving.
I never set out to be any kind of authority or spokesperson for anything or anyone, least of all the Techdirt comments section. Posting an inordinate amount of comments makes me a target for the most active trolls, and I get that. But it felt like you and at least one other person were spending months needling me over my (admittedly privileged and naïve) stances on free speech and political violence because I wasn’t willing to endorse censorship, violence, and other such means to achieve political ends. Even when other people echoed similar stances, I was still the one who was targeted by passive-aggressive “oh, surely we can vote our way out of this~!” bullshit.
Despite what I’ve written here and what you may think of me, I’m well aware that shit is really fucking bad out there. I know marginalized people are having a rough go of it, especially immigrants and trans people. Nothing about that makes me happy. But as I see it, nothing about where we are as a country right now has any easy solutions from any angle. If we stay peaceful and try “voting the evil away”, that won’t work at all. If we get violent, we’re going to see American society collapse in a way that will be bad for everyone. Everyone wants a revolution until their power goes out, their taps run dry, and their kids are starving.
To be perfectly level with you: Given my life circumstances (which don’t need deep exploring at this juncture), I’m lucky to be alive. If I wasn’t privileged enough to be where I am right now, I’d likely have died years ago. So I have to be incredibly pragmatic about how I live and what I do because if my circumstances change for the worse, chances are good that I’ll be dead within a month. That mindset makes me pragmatic about what I believe as well. It’s why I’m careful not to, as they say on social media, “fedpost”—and it’s why I’m careful to defend people’s speech rights only on the basis of their having the right to speak, since doing so makes my rights morally and ethically easier to defend as a result.
Moments like this are when I think of the scene between Batman and Jason Todd at the end of the animated film Batman: Under the Red Hood. Jason is interrogating Batman about why he never killed The Joker after Joker killed Jason (who was later resurrected), which leads to this exchange:
That’s how I feel about censorship and political violence: They’re tempting as solutions to problems, but once you pull the trigger (metaphorically or literally), all that does is make justifying the next time you pull the trigger that much easier. Trying to silence bigots and fascists through the law is tempting—God, is it tempting!—but the power to make that happen, at least under U.S. law as it is today, comes with too great a temptation to start lashing out at other targets. And if the people being targeted by such laws get back into office, they could very well use that same power against people like you and me. That’s why I don’t condone or endorse censorship of the “worst people” even though that stance makes me sound like a deluded jackass.
All that said: I do accept your apology, and I hope your friend is okay. I also accept your challenge to better educate myself. Trust me when I say that I know I could use that education, especially if I want to be less of a privileged dumbass. And despite what you might think, I also hope you don’t stop commenting here.
One thing I do appreciate about being challenged on my bullshit is the fact that I get challenged on my bullshit. That keeps me from living in an echo chamber and being led to think all my bullshit is always right. What I don’t appreciate is being made to feel like I’m supposed to have all the answers to every major sociopolitical problem in the U.S. or else I’m a piece of shit who deserves to die in a gutter. If you can clamp back on that sort of rhetoric, I’m more than happy to argue with you at length (even if it doesn’t do my ADHD and other assorted neurodivergences any favors) because I do genuinely appreciate the opportunity to learn and grow and be less of a fuck-up.
I’m so fucked up in so many ways, and I tend to take that out on people in ways like I did above. Lord knows, I need an amount of therapy that would have to be bankrolled by Jeff Bezos or George Soros. But for whatever it’s worth coming from me, I sincerely apologize for making you feel like shit as well. That’s not something I like doing to people—including myself—and I really do try hard not to be someone who hurts people unnecessarily.
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Stephen “Institutions Will Not Save You” Stone:
“It’s actually about the ethics of following the guidelines of the Constitution.”
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Since you don’t actually have a better proposal than mine, it sounds like we should be cheering on my idea.
Which is, mostly, let the courts sort it out and leave an exception for ‘verifiable truth’
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Two things.
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We get it, you like Fascism.
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I’m curious – are you blind to the irony of making both of these statements at the same time, or are you choosing to ignore it?
64th? We’re still edging out Panama and Belize. Pathetic. Let me know when we’re less free than Hungary. That’s when we’ll be great again.
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Hungary is 74th, so loosing 10 places for 2027 should be pretty easy at the current pace.
Now, Venezuela is 159th and Iran is 177th, so let’s wait for Trump to declare he wanted to improve press freedom in theses countries.
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Iran-level is the long game for the “Christian” nationalists. Like Samuel Alito.
Cue Turnip suing Reporters Without Borders.
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This means absolutely nothing, you realize. It’s purely a political determination. It IS propaganda.
In ALL these countries you can be arrested for saying the wrong thing.
State run media is a very bad thing, actually.
You people are so ridiculous.
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Okay, let’s say it actually is propaganda. What is the organization’s goal in releasing that propaganda? What are they looking to achieve with it?
A direct verbal threat is an arrestable offense in the US. Why doesn’t that count as “the wrong thing” to you?
Public media != state-run media. You’ve just been indoctrinated to think that.
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The trump admin are tracking and trying to have big tech doxx their critics and anyone less than delighted about ICE killing people, and are having the DOJ work on finding ways to prosecute people for pictures of seashells… But sure, it’s Europe where people aren’t in fact free to say what they will.
It’s funny how people like JD Vance, Elon and yourself never mention exactly what the people supposedly being prosecuted are being prosecuted for. The silence always says more than your words.
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And yet, you have no trouble defending Fox News, which is effectively the media arm of the GOP (and Donald Trump in particular).
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Since you’ve provided no evidence with your bitching, I’m going to just go ahead and disregard everything you’ve said.
It’s always funny when the relentless propaganda about American freedom people there are indoctrinated with crashes into information from outside that bubble.
'Only 64? We can crack 100 within the next year easy!' -Trump regime
The most messed up part? I’m honestly amazed that the US is just barely out of the top third, though I suppose there’s still a few more years for the Trump regime to make a play for dead last just like they seem to be doing for everything else like ‘economy’ and ‘international reputation/trust’.
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A reminder that the Trump regime has only officially been in power for about three and a half months; the ranking is probably based on 2025 data.
Our major news media abuses and perverts the very protections they have under our First Amendment to spread outright lies and disinformation in pursuit of a political agenda.
Today’s media doesn’t deserve the protections they receive.