Comment on The 2025 World Press Freedom Index is released
match@pawb.social 1 week agothere’s only 71 democracies (counting flawed democracies such as the US) out of the ~170 in the world, per the democracy index. RSF assigns a lot of weight into how many reporters are killed in each country
M1ch431@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
Truly, thanks for your response - I understand now that it does seem to be one of the major factors that goes into their ranking.
I just feel like ranking press freedom is flawed when things are this fucked. Here in the US, whistleblowers are persecuted or killed, accurate and unbiased reporting on events feels like it almost never happens, omission of newsworthy events is rampant, independent journalism is at the behest of a few corporations that have total control of the algorithms and the platforms that these journalists rely on, a couple corporations own the entirety of all mainstream media… I could go on, but I’d just be preaching to the choir in all likelihood.
match@pawb.social 1 week ago
it’s true, it’s desperately fucked knowing that these newspapers and institutions started indexes (the democracy index, the press freedom index, the human development index, Gini inequality…) in the 1990s-2000s, and at the time they, and maybe everyone who’s now over the age of 40, had this beautiful optimism that the world would continue to become more free and more equal and more righteous, only to hit this global collapse that we have awesome tools for objectively measuring and no hard or soft power to resist
M1ch431@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
100%.