We're Number 48!

Reporters sans frontieres, an international organization dedicated to freedom of the press, has published its latest rankings of countries, and I'm shocked to discover that the United States, home of the First Amendment, ranks 48th out of 168 countries. Nor am I reassured to learn that 48th place is actually an improvement from last year.

This is all the group has to say about the U.S. this year:

There were slightly fewer press freedom violations in the United States (48th) and blogger Josh Wolf was freed after 224 days in prison. But the detention of Al-Jazeera’s Sudanese cameraman, Sami Al-Haj, since 13 June 2002 at the military base of Guantanamo and the murder of Chauncey Bailey in Oakland in August mean the United States is still unable to join the lead group.

Presumably one has to go to their backlog of reports to find the raw data that earned the U.S. its dubious ranking. As a caveat, I note that RSF factors "self-censorship" into its index. That's pretty much a non-quantifiable category and to some extent purely a matter of subjective perception. You may have firsthand confessions from editors or publishers about suppressing stories, but more likely in a lot of cases it comes down to one group thinking certain stories ought to be covered and crying "self-censorship" if they aren't.

I googled Chauncey Bailey and learned that he was a newspaper reporter whose murder is allegedly tied to stories he had written about a power struggle involving a bakery owned by Black Muslims. His example is apparently meant to show that circumstances other than government policy contribute to creating an unsafe environment for journalists. Josh Wolf was held in jail for all that time because the government wanted videos he had made of an anti-G8 protest in 2005, including footage of police brutality and intimidation. That's more what I think of when someone says press freedoms are endangered. Sami Al-Haj's story is detailed here, and while it's no credit to the U.S., I wonder whether the capture of an alleged enemy combatant on foreign soil should count against press freedom at home.

I don't raise these questions to suggest that the U.S. should get a higher rating. If it were a press diversity survey, my country would probably deserve an even lower rating. I just naturally wonder how anyone comes up with standards to judge concerns like press freedom objectively. My own subjective impression of post-911 America is that things have definitely been better in the past, and could certainly be better now.