A yearly report released by Reporters Without Borders (RWB) lists the US as the 46th freest press, down 14 spots from last year. The United States now ranks just above Haiti, and just below the former Soviet state of Romania.
The report labels the US and Brazil as the two developed nations in the Americas with the most disappointing track record on freedom of press.
“Rich in diversity, the United States and Brazil should have given freedom of information a supreme position both in their laws and their social values. Unfortunately the reality falls far short of this.”
RWB attributes the recent fall from freedom to the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent actions of the Bush and Obama Presidential administrations.
“In the United States, 9/11 spawned a major conflict between the imperatives of national security and the principles of the constitution’s First Amendment. This amendment enshrines every person’s right to inform and be informed. But the heritage of the 1776 constitution was shaken to its foundations during George W. Bush’s two terms as president by the way journalists were harassed and even imprisoned for refusing to reveal their sources or surrender their files to federal judicial officials.
There has been little improvement in practice under Barack Obama. Rather than pursuing journalists, the emphasis has been on going after their sources, but often using the journalist to identify them. No fewer that eight individuals have been charged under the Espionage Act since Obama became president, compared with three during Bush’s two terms. While 2012 was in part the year of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, 2013 will be remember [sic] for the National Security Agency computer specialist Edward Snowden, who exposed the mass surveillance methods developed by the US intelligence agencies.”
Yet again, we are seeing our Constitutional rights being trampled on by the government, and now even the left-leaning national media is waking up to it. The US has fallen in this ranking for the last several years, and with the Obama Administration’s record of persecuting journalists, it is doubtful that the US will become a safe place for information freedom again anytime soon.
The country with the world’s freest press? Finland.
