Freedom House: getting worse with freedom of the press in the world – Polish Radio

The organization Freedom House estimates that the percentage of the world’s population who have access to free media in 2014 was just 14 percent.
Authors of the report note at the outset that journalists around the world face “from all sides” to more more restrictions.
“Governments use the law in the area of ​​security and the fight against terrorism as a pretext to silence critical voices, while militant groups and gangs use increasingly brazen methods of intimidation of journalists. In turn, media owners are trying to manipulate media content so as to serve political or economic interests “- Jennifer Dunham assessed from Freedom House.
The report says that more and more areas of the world becomes practically inaccessible to journalists because different existing restrictions, including those related to safety excused, does not allow the local or foreign media.

The threat of counter-propaganda
“One of the most disturbing developments of the past year was the struggle of democratic countries with the onslaught of propaganda coming from countries, authoritarian and militant groups” – said Dunham . According to her, there is a danger that instead of encouraging objective journalism and freedom of information, democracies are in response to resort to censorship or will use the same propaganda.
The report, which contains an analysis of the media situation in 199 countries shows that only in 63 of them, including Poland, there is freedom of the press; in 71 countries, is “partial freedom of the press” and the remaining 65 did not exist at all. And that means according to Freedom House criteria that only every seventh person in the world, or about 14 percent. the global population has access to free media.

The situation worsened almost everywhere
media situation has deteriorated almost everywhere except Sub-Saharan Africa, where there has been a slight improvement. The report highlights some of the countries that recorded in the last five years, exceptional regress; These are Greece, Turkey, Hungary, Serbia, Honduras, Ecuador, Thailand and Hong Kong.
worst in the report fall Belarus, Crimea (the first time assessed separately), Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Syria , Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Europe still performs best, but here too a regression in terms of freedom of the press was in the past, the highest in 10 years because of the situation of journalists in Russia. Worse is also in China, where the authorities strengthened the control over the media. The highest progress compared with the previous year recorded Tunisia.

PAP / agkm

The report by Freedom House & gt; & gt; & gt;