Committee to Protect Journalists <http://www.cpj.org/>;
International Press Institute <http://www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/>;
Reporters without Borders <http://www.rsf.org/>.
For CPJ, the ten most censored countries are North Korea, Burma, Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea, and Libya (CJP's top five), plus Eritrea, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Syria, and Belarus (at <http://www.cpj.org/censored/censored_06.html>).
IPI has a "watch list," which isn't the list of the worst offenders but that of "countries in danger of becoming repressive." On the watch list are Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Russia, and Venezuela (at <http://www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/watchlist.html>).
RSF's worst ten are North Korea, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, Iran, Burma, Libya, Cuba, Nepal, and China (in that order).
Differences exist among the three organizations, but there are things that they have in common:
Saudi Arabia (where no free press by any definition exists) and the USA in Iraq (where the largest number of journalists have been killed, with the number trending up) manage to escape both CPJ's and RSF's worst ten lists and IPI's watch list.
Needless to say, all three exclusively focus on state control of the media and scrupulously avoid the problem of corporate censorship and information management and even public-private partnership in censorship and information management.
On 10/10/06, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> I offer the below to those who believe in the sanctity of "methods"
<snip>
> Last week, CNET's Elinor Mills reported on how a web search for "Martin
> Luther King" returns, as its first result on Google and as its second result
> on Windows Live Search, a web site (martinlutherking.org) operated by a
> white supremacist organization named Stormfront. The site, titled "Martin
> Luther King Jr.: A True Historical Examination," refers to King as "The
> Beast" and says he was "just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating
> Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people."
> The site also features an essay on "Jews & Civil Rights" by former Ku Klux
> Klan official David Duke.
<snip>
> At Google, a Web site's ranking is determined by computer algorithms using
> thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to any given query, a
> company representative said. The company can't tweak the results because of
> that automation and the need to maintain the integrity of the results, she
> said. "In this particular example, the page is relevant to the query and
> many people have linked to it, giving it more PageRank than some of the
> other pages. These two factors contribute to its ranking," the
> representative wrote in an e-mail.
For all its professed commitment to the "integrity" of results by algorithms, Google is happy to collaborate with the Chinese government to censor search results and manage information:
<blockquote>In January, a few months after [Kai-Fu] Lee [head of operations for Google in China] opened the Beijing office, the company announced it would be introducing a new version of its search engine for the Chinese market. To obey China's censorship laws, Google's representatives explained, the company had agreed to purge its search results of any Web sites disapproved of by the Chinese government, including Web sites promoting Falun Gong, a government-banned spiritual movement; sites promoting free speech in China; or any mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. If you search for "Tibet" or "Falun Gong" most anywhere in the world on google.com, you'll find thousands of blog entries, news items and chat rooms on Chinese repression. Do the same search inside China on google.cn, and most, if not all, of these links will be gone. Google will have erased them completely. (Clive Thompson, "Google's China Problem (and China's Google Problem)," <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23google.html>)</blockquote>
Then, there are NGOs dedicated to generating flaks and narrowing the range of debate:
On 10/10/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Washington Post - October 9, 2006
>
> In N.Y., Sparks Fly Over Israel Criticism
> Polish Consulate Says Jewish Groups Called To Oppose Historian
> By Michael Powell
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Monday, October 9, 2006; Page A03
>
>
> NEW YORK -- Two major American Jewish organizations helped block a
> prominent New York University historian from speaking at the Polish
> consulate here last week, saying the academic was too critical of
> Israel and American Jewry.
>
> The historian, Tony Judt, is Jewish and directs New York University's
> Remarque Institute, which promotes the study of Europe. Judt was
> scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a nonprofit organization that rents space
> from the consulate. Judt's subject was the Israel lobby in the United
> States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled
> honest debate.
>
> An hour before Judt was to arrive, the Polish Consul General
> Krzysztof Kasprzyk canceled the talk. He said the Anti-Defamation
> League and the American Jewish Committee had called and he quickly
> concluded Judt was too controversial.
>
> "The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as
> exercising a delicate pressure," Kasprzyk said. "That's obvious -- we
> are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that."
>
> Judt, who was born and raised in England and lost much of his family
> in the Holocaust, took strong exception to the cancellation of his
> speech. He noted that he was forced to cancel another speech later
> this month at Manhattan College in the Bronx after a different Jewish
> group had complained. Other prominent academics have described
> encountering such problems, in some cases more severe, stretching
> over the past three decades.
>
> The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling.
Chomsky and Herman have analyzed how flaks work and help manufacture consent in a general sense, but, to my knowledge, no scholar or organization has undertaken to document the pattern that Judt mentions.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>