Double checking your sources is an important and good thing. This is my post-positivist interpretation on the results below: It depends on the questions asked in the surveys as I noted yesterday. One factor, in my view, is the murder of journalists in a combat zone like Iraq. Some others, as you note, are various forms of possible or actual state censorship such as shutting down newspapers, including imprisonment or assassination of vocal press critics of state policy as a way to dampen criticism and as a human rights violation. Corporate censorship is also important, I agree. Bottom line: you need to put all of this information together and make a decision. Such as is Iran really oppressive in press freedom or is this a US plot to unfairly tar the country? Personally, I have read a lot on their approach to the press and I think press freedom falls into a long line of other human rights violations against gays, woman, and of course the overt anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial practiced by the top leadership.
Conflicts of interest should also be duly noted in the assessment--like government and intelligence funding sources. However, proportionality and proof of causal links are also important. So far, as is sometimes the case on Cockburn's web site--there has been a lot of PR about funding sources and very little indicating except inneundos and interpretations about Haiti and such that this has influenced their analysis. I am sure that *may* probably be the case, but I am underwhelmed by journalists like Cockburn and co. that have no hard prove of such in their stories so far.
Response to Chris Doss:
42 journalists have been murdered in Russia (most not by the mob) but in Chechnya and during the 1993 coup in Russia since the early 1990s. Sorry to say your country is a hot spot in the world for the assassination variable in lack of press freedom. No way of spinning that other than what it is. I am not sure why, however, you think a demonstration on the subject is fruitless as other forms of protest have already occurred. Haven't the Moscow Union of Journalists issued a public condemnation and called for a thorough investigation? Could it be what you are really objecting to is bad publicity outside of Russia?
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 09:51:23 -0400 From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages at gmail.com> Subject: [lbo-talk] Watching the Watchdogs
There are several press freedom watchdog groups.
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.