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The organization Reporters Without Borders conducts an annual ranking comparing each nation’s level of press freedom, and they’ve just dropped the U.S. rating by 27 places. The dramatic drop came as a result of the many arrests and efforts to harass reporters trying to cover the Occupy movement and the police raids of Occupy encampments. In the 2010 ratings, America was ranked 20th in press freedom, but we have now dropped to 47th this year. From Reporters Without Borders:
Led by President Yoweri Museveni, Uganda (139th) launched an unprecedented crackdown on opposition movements and independent media after the elections in February. Similarly, Chile (80th) fell 47 places because of its many freedom of information violations, committed very often by the security forces during student protests. The United States (47th) also owed its fall of 27 places to the many arrests of journalist covering Occupy Wall Street protests.
We are now ranked lower then most western European countries including Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, UK, France, Spain, etc.
One of the many things the occupy movement has done is help focus more attention on the aggressive militarization of basic law enforcement in the United States. And that’s been combined with police efforts to prevent both professional and amateur reporters from covering the story.
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Yupper.
These bastards are gettin’ busy, big time.
On all fronts, Americans are finding themselves rolled back, rolled up,ripped off, exploited, terrorized, and shoved off to the outer realms of a shrinking commonwealth.
And no, Virginia, this ain’t perpetrated by pernicious furriners. It’s the spawn of Prescott Bush family-style fascism.
They just had to wait six decades to defeat the American Experiment.
What you said.
Another piece in the Weimarization of America…
47th? That’s being generous.
Does the MSM really care about press freedom? They seem completely happy in their cushy role as mouthpiece for the PTB. Real debate never takes place in the MSM, just endless echoes of the faux GOP vs. Dem dust-ups engineered by the DC pols. Face it, they’re part of the 1% and happy to stay that way.
I’m sure this keeps Obama up at night, too. Not!
Bravo! Excellent and concise observation. I wonder where the USA would rank if the category was corporate controlled propaganda.
Tied with Argentina and Romania. W00t! But we beat out Italy (61st), Brazil (99th), China (174), Iran(175), and North Korea (178). I’m sure if we try harder we can outscore them next year!
It’s like the World Cup in reverse. The sucker championship of the world. :-(
Leaving aside Spain, since 1945 was the US ever ranked above any of those?
Ranking countries by the number of journalist heads busted by police is misleading. The loss of freedom of the press in the United States isn’t due to the liberties taken by cops on the street. It’s due to the monopoly control of the media by large corporations, which prevents independent journalism from reaching a broad audience.
x2
That’s what I was thinking. I don’t think the MSM really care about press freedom. They care about getting into the right cocktail parties and hanging out with those in power. The last thing on their minds is aggressive journalism.
Oilybomber doesn’t want the word out, ya know.
It is interesting to compare this list against countries with AAA credit ratings. I would enjoy overlaying literacy rates and math literacy rates with this data.
From Wikipedia’s List of countries by literacy rate:
“For highly developed/high income countries where literacy statistics were not collected, a rate of 99% was assumed.”
Irresponsible assumption, that.
I recall seeing figures from the World Almanac(s), US had a 97% literacy rate, which is virtually semi-literate and practically illiterate compared to the rest of the developed countries where 100% and 99.9% rates were typical.
You’re right. We’re on the road to fascism.
You might appreciate this list. These are interesting dots to connect.
And this is an interesting read too.
A follow-up to this post would be interesting in terms of questions which need to be asked of our nation and how the loss of freedoms and economic stability is corollary to poor educational support and outcomes.
We’ve come a long way since the Lou Grant days. But we’ve gone backward.
If Reporters without Borders took the Fusion Centers eavesdropping on every reporters cell, computor, Ipad, Iphone, etc, etc, one would have to imagine we would of dropped to the same ranking North Korea or Iran. Of course my statement on the fusion centers is pure conjecture. Did you know we once thought torture by the US Army and CIA was pure conjecture also ?