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> 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 re

> 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/.

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/.