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I find it difficult to tell how their reports translate to objective numbers. For example, the United States’ ranking fell from 45 to 55 in the last year. Here

I find it difficult to tell how their reports translate to objective numbers. For example, the United States’ ranking fell from 45 to 55 in the last year. Here are the reports for those years: https://web.archive.org/web/20230817030548/https://rsf.org/en/country/united-states https://web.archive.org/web/20230817030548/https://rsf.org/e... https://web.archive.org/web/20240505202537/https://rsf.org/en/country/united-states https://web.archive.org/web/20240505202537/https://rsf.org/e... As far as I can tell, the only negative differences between these two reports are that a reporter was killed while investigating a murder by the murder suspect (who is now in jail and on trial), and that Biden “has come under criticism for failing to press US partners like Israel and Saudi Arabia on press freedom.” Falling ten places is a significant change (and is called out in the preface to the whole report)—are these two things really enough to justify such a change, or is the ranking sourced from more data not present in the report? Here’s another story about Reporters Without Borders, about the first time I dug into one of their publications. In 2018, I read a report they published listing the six most dangerous countries for journalists: India, Yemen, Mexico, Syria, Afghanistan, and the United States. It described how in Mexico journalists are executed by cartels and organized crime, how journalists in Yemen die in prison due to mistreatment, how in Syria journalists were killed in airstrikes and taken hostage by Islamic militants, how in India Hindu nationalist mobs would run down journalists with trucks… and how in the US, four journalists were murdered by a stalker angry at a 2011 story the newspaper had published (subsequently jailed, tried, and found guilty of mass murder); and two more were killed by a falling tree. Somehow these two cases were enough to warrant the United States being called out with the other five countries. And it made the headlines everywhere, of course, because it was the midst of Donald Trump’s presidency.

burkaman 2y ago
It's a ranking, so presumably part of the US dropping is due to other countries improving. There is another major negative change noted though - more newspaper closures and huge layoffs at news organizations. It also sounds like the Sociocultural section might be partially based on polling of trust in media, which could have dropped, but I don't know where to look into that more. The 2018 report you're talking about is here: https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/worldwilde_round-up.pdf https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/worldwilde_round-up.pdf. The list is not the most dangerous countries for journalists, but the most deadly - a straightforward measure of how many journalists were killed in each country. They publish this every year and the US is usually not on it, but this year someone murdered 4 journalists because of their reporting. I'm not sure how they could make this more objective, and I can't think of any metric that would include murders committed by angry men in cartels or angry men with SUVs in India but not angry men with shotguns in America. Obviously the falling tree is not reflective of the journalistic climate in the country, but if they had been the only two the US would not have been listed. The mass shooting is what put it within the same neighborhood as Mexico and India. Here's the latest one of these, which as usual does not feature America: https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/medias/file/2023/12/Bilan_2023_EN_0.pdf https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/medias/file/2023/12/Bila....
- bentley 2y ago
  > It's a ranking, so presumably part of the US dropping is due to other countries improving. Is that the case? Do the other countries’ entries in the report reflect that? > I can't think of any metric that would include murders committed by angry men in cartels or angry men with SUVs in India but not angry men with shotguns in America. One such metric would be whether a country’s justice system arrests and puts the perpetrator on trial, as happened with the American murder and presumably didn’t happen in the case of Mexican cartels or the Indian mob.
  - burkaman 2y ago
    Yes, the following countries improved their scores between 2023 and 2024 and passed the US (71.22 -> 66.59) in the ranking: Chile (60.09 -> 67.32), Ghana (65.93 -> 67.71), Poland (67.66 -> 69.17), Fiji (59.27 -> 71.23), Armenia (70.61 -> 71.6), Slovenia (70.59 -> 72.6), Mauritania (59.45 -> 74.2), Suriname (70.62 -> 76.11). I agree that whether or not perpetrators are tried is relevant to the country, but I don't agree that it's relevant to this metric or to the dead journalists. They don't come back to life if their murderer is imprisoned, and the arrest rate doesn't have any impact on how dangerous it was to be a journalist that year. If they were to do a forward-looking report on the outlook for journalists in each country in the next 10 years or so, then I do think the effectiveness of the justice system might be relevant. In the Indian cases named in the 2018 report, arrests were made: https://apnews.com/general-news-eb9e0dbcdbab4d93a2d90767c270fbd8 https://apnews.com/general-news-eb9e0dbcdbab4d93a2d90767c270..., https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/madhya-pradesh-journalist-murder-driver-of-the-truck-which-ran-over-sandeep-sharma-arrested-1198527-2018-03-26 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/madhya-pradesh-journal.... The situation in Mexico was a bit more grim, but in at least one of the cases the police did make several arrests: https://cpj.org/data/people/mario-leonel-gomez-sanchez/ https://cpj.org/data/people/mario-leonel-gomez-sanchez/.
jeswin 2y ago
> how in India Hindu nationalist mobs would run down journalists with trucks Sorry I might have missed this. I live in India, and I've never heard of nationalist mobs running down journalists (plural?!) with trucks. Do you have any links to share? Google doesn't give me anything.

burkaman 2y ago

It's a ranking, so presumably part of the US dropping is due to other countries improving. There is another major negative change noted though - more newspaper closures and huge layoffs at news organizations. It also sounds like the Sociocultural section might be partially based on polling of trust in media, which could have dropped, but I don't know where to look into that more. The 2018 report you're talking about is here: https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/worldwilde_round-up.pdf https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/worldwilde_round-up.pdf. The list is not the most dangerous countries for journalists, but the most deadly - a straightforward measure of how many journalists were killed in each country. They publish this every year and the US is usually not on it, but this year someone murdered 4 journalists because of their reporting. I'm not sure how they could make this more objective, and I can't think of any metric that would include murders committed by angry men in cartels or angry men with SUVs in India but not angry men with shotguns in America. Obviously the falling tree is not reflective of the journalistic climate in the country, but if they had been the only two the US would not have been listed. The mass shooting is what put it within the same neighborhood as Mexico and India. Here's the latest one of these, which as usual does not feature America: https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/medias/file/2023/12/Bilan_2023_EN_0.pdf https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/medias/file/2023/12/Bila....

bentley 2y ago
> It's a ranking, so presumably part of the US dropping is due to other countries improving. Is that the case? Do the other countries’ entries in the report reflect that? > I can't think of any metric that would include murders committed by angry men in cartels or angry men with SUVs in India but not angry men with shotguns in America. One such metric would be whether a country’s justice system arrests and puts the perpetrator on trial, as happened with the American murder and presumably didn’t happen in the case of Mexican cartels or the Indian mob.
- burkaman 2y ago
  Yes, the following countries improved their scores between 2023 and 2024 and passed the US (71.22 -> 66.59) in the ranking: Chile (60.09 -> 67.32), Ghana (65.93 -> 67.71), Poland (67.66 -> 69.17), Fiji (59.27 -> 71.23), Armenia (70.61 -> 71.6), Slovenia (70.59 -> 72.6), Mauritania (59.45 -> 74.2), Suriname (70.62 -> 76.11). I agree that whether or not perpetrators are tried is relevant to the country, but I don't agree that it's relevant to this metric or to the dead journalists. They don't come back to life if their murderer is imprisoned, and the arrest rate doesn't have any impact on how dangerous it was to be a journalist that year. If they were to do a forward-looking report on the outlook for journalists in each country in the next 10 years or so, then I do think the effectiveness of the justice system might be relevant. In the Indian cases named in the 2018 report, arrests were made: https://apnews.com/general-news-eb9e0dbcdbab4d93a2d90767c270fbd8 https://apnews.com/general-news-eb9e0dbcdbab4d93a2d90767c270..., https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/madhya-pradesh-journalist-murder-driver-of-the-truck-which-ran-over-sandeep-sharma-arrested-1198527-2018-03-26 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/madhya-pradesh-journal.... The situation in Mexico was a bit more grim, but in at least one of the cases the police did make several arrests: https://cpj.org/data/people/mario-leonel-gomez-sanchez/ https://cpj.org/data/people/mario-leonel-gomez-sanchez/.

jeswin 2y ago

> how in India Hindu nationalist mobs would run down journalists with trucks Sorry I might have missed this. I live in India, and I've never heard of nationalist mobs running down journalists (plural?!) with trucks. Do you have any links to share? Google doesn't give me anything.