Global media index ranks U.S. No. 43
The United States’ ranking for press freedom declined last year, driven in part by President Trump’s attacks on the news media, which also triggered a decline in other democracies, an international media organization said Wednesday.
Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the World Press Freedom Index based on its assessment of the legal environment and government threats to journalists, ranked the United States 43rd out of 180 nations. It finished two spots lower than a year ago, just behind Burkina Faso and just ahead of Comoros.
“The election of the 45th president of the United States set off a witch hunt against journalists,” the group said in an analysis of its data. “Donald Trump’s repeated diatribes against the Fourth Estate and its representatives — accusing them of being ‘among the most dishonest human beings on Earth’ and of deliberately spreading ‘fake news’ — compromise a long U.S. tradition of defending freedom of expression.”
It added that Trump’s “hate speech” helped unleash attacks on the media “almost everywhere in the world,” including in countries with long democratic traditions, such as Britain, France and Italy.
Government officials have even applied direct political pressure on news organizations in places where it was rarely known, the Paris organization said. It cited Finland — ranked as the top nation for press freedom the past six years but third this year — for an incident last year in which Prime Minister Juha Sipila appeared to to suppress a story unfavorable to him.
Even in democracies, it said, “the overall trend is toward adoption of legislation and provisions that threaten the essential conditions for a free press,” such as government surveillance of journalists.
The top nations were all in Northern Europe: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands. The worst-ranked were notoriously oppressive regimes such as North Korea, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, Syria and China.
The group also continued its criticism of Trump’s predecessor. It noted: “It bears repeating that (President Barack Obama) left behind a flimsy legacy for press freedom and access to information.”