US Ranks 41st in Press Freedom Index Thanks to 'War on Whistleblowers'
npr.org
npr.org
RFS on Jamaica at 10: " The very occasional physical attacks on journalists must be offset against this, but no serious act of violence or threat to media freedom has been reported since February 2009, a month that saw two cases of abuse of authority by the Kingston police."
Or even Ireland at 9: "... defamation lawsuits are common. Finally, interviewing police sources has been virtually impossible since the Garda Siochana Act of 2005, which bans police officers from talking to journalists without prior authorization."
Not a little biased are we? Amnesty for murdering journalists isnt my idea of freedom of the press, nor are defamation law suits, or a prohibition against interviewing the police.
Also, caving on free speech for international political reasons is still caving on free speech. Protecting people from such political calculations is the whole point of constitutional guarantees of free speech in the first place.
Look at the enormous change in U.S. police prosecutions in the last couple of years due to public pressure. I seriously doubt the amount of misconduct drastically increased.
Though CaptainZapp's reply was low-signal, snarky, and redundant with her/his down vote, it did inspire me to learn more about German law.
It appears that by statute, German prosecutors have little discretion when it comes to pursuing convictable cases. They may only nonprosecute minor offenses, i.e. those with sentences of less than one year. However, there are exceptions that are applied by prosecutors that could apply to this case. One is the "serves the public interest" exception; another is the "may damage state interests" exception. Either way, the answer isn't cut and dry and contains way more nuance than my original comment and its reply suggest.
[1]. http://law.jrank.org/pages/1855/Prosecution-Comparative-Aspe...
That law explicitly (and untypically) states that the executive has to decide that the district attorney may press charges, which was granted in this case. The law is stated as "the executive needs to authorise prosecution", but due to how it's structured (executive reigning in to a matter of court) it's really more of a veto. (http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg... - section 104a is about the veto)
Then there's the rule that when laws change, the sentence is capped at the "mildest" legal result for the defendant between opening the case and the final verdict (to paraphrase things _very_ roughly, details at https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/2.html, in english at http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg...).
So what could happen:
1. The executive (through Merkel) allowed the use of the law in this instance. At the same time, there's consensus within the executive and most of the legislative that the law should be repealed.
2. The jurisprudence opens the case, it drags on for a year. (or they decide not to take on the case, in which case everything stops here)
3. There's a verdict. Boehmermann can appeal several times, dragging this on for another 4 years or so.
4. At some point the law gets repealed.
5. The next time a court hears the case, they'll kick it out because there's no law and therefore there can be no prosecution.
An alternative reality might be:
1. The executive stopped prosecution under this law because they can.
2. We'd hear about how the German government stepped in on matters of jurisprudence every. single. time. that Germany complains about overreach and a lack of rule of law in Turkey (and probably elsewhere). A gift that keeps on giving.
Then there's also the more general defamation law (applicable to everybody and with no executive veto clause). Due to where the TV station is headquartered, the case is handled in Mainz. For those defamation cases, the Mainz district attorney has a rule that a mandatory mediation meeting must happen in person in Mainz, with no exceptions.
Not sure mediation is something Erdogan really wants to do for what is essentially a populist stunt.
The ranking for Slovakia at 12 seems at odds with its description "Defamation is punishable by up to eight years in prison, the harshest penalty for this offence in the European Union. Many legal actions have been brought by businessmen, politicians and judicial officials. Prime Minister Robert Fico initiated several during his first term. Censorship was tightened in 2014 by the adoption of a regulation limiting the number of journalists with parliamentary accreditation, restricting their movements within the parliament and banning them from photographing the personal property of parliamentarians."
You cannot begin with an intuitive notion of the countries that you want to have a high "press freedom" index and when the actual scores don't match your intuition blame it on the assumed bias of the source.
I'm certainly open to the idea that this report is crap, but they have data, numbers, a sample, formulas, and reasoning and arguments for why they did things the way they did. If you think they are incorrect, explain why, don't just say "this doesn't fit my preconceived notions about the countries I want to believe are more free, so the people who did it are lying".
For example, I'm not at all shocked that they rated Lebanon as having higher press freedom than Israel, in fact that's probably to me an indicator that they are doing something right and not just picking out statistical proxies for western european-style nations.
And while it's true that I can't hold an intuitive understanding of the freedom of the press in various countries I can some how understand that countries where the government shuts down TV stations and news papers all day long probably have less freedom than countries where "organized crime" harasses Journalists.
I literally can't think of any other reason.
What do you mean by aggregated data? I'm fairly well trained in mathematics and statistics but I'm not sure what that phrase means -- does it not just mean the statistics derived from the sample?
And doesn't it matter mostly how /the journalists/ feel about how much press freedom they have? Journalists may very well not be effected by overreaching hate crime legislation (journalism rarely involves writing hate speech) though laypeople see it as a violation of freedom of speech. Organized crime may feel more oppressive than certain oppressive governments. And the survey only purports to express the opinions of journalists in many countries about how free they feel they are, it doesn't pretend to solve a centuries old open problem in philosophy and accurately define 'freedom' and then measure it.
Even a grad student could present statistics to show whatever they wanted (trust me I've done it...), and you can orient survey questions, or even ask them in a certain order that you will guarantee a certain response.
It's like asking "What are your thoughts on the freedom of press that you enjoy?", versus "How do you feel about your government's attempts to curb press freedom?"
As Ronald Coase said, "If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase
The fact that you have used statistics to lie does not mean that these people have. They published their questionnaire, you can read it. They published a detailed description of their methods, you can read them. That's the best we can do in science.
It is not only malicious but even worse, lazy, to say "I don't like your results, so your methods must be bad", which is literally all I've seen in this thread. That and "country X doesn't have literally the exact same definition of freedom of speech as the U.S., how could they possibly score high on a press freedom [which is only tangentially related to freedom of speech] index?!?!?! LOL"
You don't need to hold a magnifiying glass to see them.
For example - see this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538812):
> From the RFS entry on Surinam, position 22: "“public expression of hatred” towards the government is punishable by up to seven years in prison under a draconian defamation law. The controversial Dési Bouterse, who became president again in 2010 in an election, has managed to be amnestied for the 1982 murders of 15 political opponents including five journalists."
> RFS on Jamaica at 10: " The very occasional physical attacks on journalists must be offset against this, but no serious act of violence or threat to media freedom has been reported since February 2009, a month that saw two cases of abuse of authority by the Kingston police."
> Or even Ireland at 9: "... defamation lawsuits are common. Finally, interviewing police sources has been virtually impossible since the Garda Siochana Act of 2005, which bans police officers from talking to journalists without prior authorization."
> Not a little biased are we? Amnesty for murdering journalists isnt my idea of freedom of the press, nor are defamation law suits, or a prohibition against interviewing the police.
Whilst everybody loves a good US-bash, if you're actually trying to tell me reporters have it harder there than any of the above, then you are seriously deluding yourself.
If there was a survey of technologists that summarized their opinions on a technical issue, but there were articles about it saying something else, would you say "well, the survey is obviously biased, look at these news articles, they tell us what the facts are no matter what the experts say"? No, you would not. Because it would be disastrously foolish to ignore the opinions of experts who actually work in the field, subjective as they may be.
Without a free press & whistleblowers democracy cannot function.
It is clear from the last five years of leaks that elected governements around the world feel they must act in secret because they suspect the electorate would not approve.
Without much more oversight this will worsen.
Free Chelsea Manning. Pardon Edward Snowden. Drop the inditement against Julian Assange. Offer sanctuary to Mossack Fonesca's whistleblower. Lead by example.
The scariest part of what you said is not that it's true, it's that you're being down voted for saying it.
> "A free press and whistleblowers are essential to democracy. Without a free press & whistleblowers democracy cannot function."
are applause lights that contribute nothing of substance to this conversation.
Pick a bunch of random people-- hell, even random politicians-- and ask them if a free press is essential to democracy. I guarantee you 100% of them will say yes, and probably 100% of them actually believe it and aren't just cynical liars. This suggests that the causes of this muzzling are deeper than people simply not realizing how important a free press is, and that the solutions are more complex than repeating two-sentence mantras that everyone already agrees with.
"Everyone" is a colloquialism meaning "most reasonable people" in this case.
The reality is that there aren't a lot of places where there's anything close to an absolute freedom of speech or the press. America really sticks out as an anomaly there, by having it written into the constitution. If it were really a strong part of a nation's culture, you'd think this wouldn't be so unusual, but it is, and in fact other western nations have laws completely contrary to this to some degree. Just look at the UK, where the truth is not an absolute defense against libel.
What does ignoring the (debatable[1]) bulk of a post - arguing that democracies should support whistleblowers, rather than persecuting them - and simply downvoting because of a repeated platitude, contribute to the conversation?
[1] Unless you think "everyone" believes Manning, Snowden and Assange should be freed/supported.
That's simply not a responsible whistleblow. Now, turning in bad programs and illegal operations that the US did, IS responsible discourse: Snowden scrubbed for potential people in his leaks. He went for policies and plans and programs, not people.
It was rumored to be revenge against her husband for holding an opinion contrary to the government. I can't remember the person's name but I do remember it happening.
Sauce for the goose, as they say.
Its falsehood is dealt with here https://theintercept.com/a-conversation-about-privacy/
Wikileaks encrypted the data and were going through it with other journalists to redact info such as agent details.
They requested the White House also vet each article before publication as did Greenwald and Poitras for Snowden - the White House never responded in either case.
Some portion of the raw data leaked by accident when a Guardian Journalist inadvertently published the decryption key.
Remember this was all pre-Snowden and traditional Journalists were playing catchup with the necessary security.
Even so no actual harm has ever been shown.
Claims to the contrary have been made as vague press releases, but no actual harm has ever been shown.
source - https://theintercept.com/2016/03/30/edward-snowden-noam-chom...
Surprising to see that Singapore is at 154 and there is Eritrea below North Korea.
I may be able to shed some light here - Singapore is considered a "kindly" dictatorship - basically, the ruling party is efficient and has a historical track record of running things well.
Corruption, in the normal sense is near zero.
So the population is happy to keep the status quo.
However, opposition to the ruling party is next to non-existent (or was before, this may have changed), there is little to no freedom of the press (that includes web blogs), and if you try to challenge the government too loudly, they tend to either jail you or file defamation suits against you which they are guaranteed to win, and bankrupt you.
I think it was William Gibson that described Singapore as "Disneyland with the death penalty" (although this was some time ago).
I am starting to think of them as just another irresponsible NGO.
Also, going through the methodology, I couldn't figure out which Indian languages are included in the survey, so, its quite possible that a major chunk of the Indian media was left out from the survey just because the translations were only in Hindi (thats my assumption).
It partly looks like political maneuvering to get more question time in them. I wonder how other countries do it. I heard there are "first question rights" and "first rows" in the US also, so old hands like Helen Thomas had advantage.
These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-...
Note this article is from 2012.
What year are you living in? There's certainly some self-censorship in Finnish media, but it's mostly related to PC-issues (e.g. disproportionate amount of of crimes committed by foreigners, and especially some humanitarian immigrants), but that's mostly a political statement by the reporters and certainly not a government policy (and thus does not extend to all of media).
1. What factors were used in deriving this list?
2. Who funds this project?
I can't find it anywhere on their site.
2. Google gives multiple cited sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders#Fund...
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Reporters_Without_Borde...
methodology: http://rsf.org/en/detailed-methodology
questionnairre: http://rsf.org/sites/default/files/indexquestionnaire_anglai...