Freedom House’s annual Freedom of the Press Index, released Monday at World Press Freedom Day events in Washington, show that press freedoms are on the decline throughout the world as authoritarian regimes tighten their control over new media forms of communication and as worsening violence in countries like Mexico has pushed more journalists into self-censorship.
As a result, the number of people worldwide who have access to a free and independent press is at its lowest point in more than a decade. Today, just one in six people lives in a country designated by Freedom House as “free.”
The annual survey examined 196 countries and territories around the world during 2010. It rated 35 per cent of them as “free,” 33 per cent as “partly free” and 32 per cent as “not free,” with the 10 worst countries including Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Libya and North Korea. In these countries, Freedom House says an independent press is “either nonexistent or barely able to operate.”
Karin Karlekar, senior editor of the report, said Freedom House has tracked the increasing misuse of licensing and regulatory frameworks by authoritarian regimes to control and silence the press by, for example, revoking broadcast licenses. Those regimes are also increasingly trying to exert control over new-media means of news dissemination over the Internet.
Non-state forces are also increasingly contributing to the suppression of press freedoms in countries such as Mexico, where the rise of drug violence has contributed to direct attacks on journalists and the silencing of countless others. As a result of that violence, Freedom House downgraded Mexico in 2010 from a “partly free” country to one that is not free.
Egypt, Honduras, Hungary, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey and Ukraine have also experienced worsening press situations in the past year. And Freedom House singled out the Middle East/North African region for a broad decline as well.
“Governments are actually very, very determined in many ways to push back,” Karlekar said, “so we see that although there are positive movements, so far there have been more negative [ones], and we hope this will change next year.”
In many states, officials are pushing back all the harder because the Internet has created new means of communication for independent media, citizens and dissidents.
“It is precisely because of the power, speed and broadness of [the Internet’s] reach that it is drawing panic in many politicians,” said Frank LaRue, the UN’s special rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression.
