Considering that such scandals tend to be revealed publicly only by a chain of coincidences, sometimes long after they occurred, the baseline assumption should

Considering that such scandals tend to be revealed publicly only by a chain of coincidences, sometimes long after they occurred, the baseline assumption should be that those things happen much, much more frequently than is apparent. The World Press Freedom Index is based on a questionnaire filled out by journalistic organizations. Simply put, this means that it cannot reflect what those organizations don't know. Thus a good score in the index can mean that a country has high press freedom – or that those in power are very good at keeping such incidents under wraps (or any combination of the two).