Reporters Without Borders (commonly known by its French acronym RSF) published its annual World Press Freedom Index on Wednesday, which the United Nations observed as the 30th annual Press Freedom Day.
RSF found the U.S. slipping three spots in press freedom under President Joe Biden but shied away from taking a hard look at how the media has contributed to this supposed erosion of journalism.
The report was particularly concerned with the erosion of press freedom in Asia, which was already in bad shape thanks to the psychotic communist dictatorship of both North Korea and the Chinese tyranny, which is the world’s worst jailer of journalists. In RSF’s view, the greatest threat besides outright authoritarian control is the “fake content industry,” whose mischief is growing much worse thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
RSF observed that the United States has “fallen three places” to become 45th in press freedom, ranked below countries such as Namibia and East Timor, but the report struggled mightily to blame deteriorating press freedom on President Joe Biden. Instead, it vaguely claimed journalism was eroding “despite the Biden administration’s efforts.”
The Biden administration is notoriously aggressive about controlling the media — a massive scandal about the White House feeding questions to reporters exploded just days before the 2023 World Press Freedom Index was released — and bitterly hostile to reporters who challenge top officials, but RSF was more concerned about the detail that “many popular news outlets are owned by a handful of wealthy individuals.”
The organization blamed Biden only for not doing enough to shore up weakening local news outlets.
“More than a dozen states and communities in the U.S. have proposed or enacted laws to limit journalists’ access to public spaces, including barring them from legislative meetings and preventing them from recording the police,” the report observed.
This illustrates a problem with many efforts to measure “freedom” around the world: they tend to view left-wing policies as synonymous with “freedom” even when they are strongly coercive, and they give left-wing leaders credit for respecting freedom based on credulous interpretations of their public statements instead of actions.
RSF is also very shy about blaming journalists themselves for declining press freedom, even though the White House question-feeding scandal mentioned above is only the latest example of media outlets voluntarily colluding with assaults on journalism.
“According to recent studies, there are unprecedented levels of distrust in the American media. The disinformation affecting American society has created an atmosphere where citizens no longer know who to trust,” the report lamented, without considering that Democrat operatives in the mainstream press pushing an endless wave of hoaxes and agenda-driven pseudo-journalism might be heavily responsible for that loss of trust.
Likewise, the report complained that “economic constraints drastically impact journalists working in the U.S., where more than 360 newspapers have closed since 2019 and where the biggest national newspapers continue to lose subscriptions.”
There are many factors that affect the bottom line of any business, including media companies, but some of the biggest layoffs and total collapses are hitting media operations notorious for their dishonesty and tedious political biases. Declining press freedom cannot be blamed on a public that loses interest in shoddy and untrustworthy products, and no serious advocate of journalistic freedom would suggest the solution is more state funding and control of the media to alleviate its financial concerns.
The Media Research Center (MRC) pointed out in March that the mainstream press simply refuses to fact-check Joe Biden, even when he tells the most extravagant and egregious lies. One of the biggest stories in media this year is the rise of Twitter’s Community Notes feature, which empowers citizen journalists to fact-check the living hell out of “professional journalists,” with frequently hilarious results.
Regimes like China that throw reporters in jail are clearly a threat to press freedom. Regimes that embrace reporters as their ideological soulmates, and expect them to push the ruling Party agenda with every publication and broadcast, are also a threat to press freedom. Advocates for press freedom should not blame the public for weakening journalism by turning away from reporters who conceal the truth.
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