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	2019 World Press Freedom Index by Christophe Deloire Reporters without Borders (RSF)   The 2019 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) shows how hostility directed towards journalists has degenerated into violence, contributing to an increase in fear.   The number of countries regarded as safe, where journalists can work in complete security, continues to decline, while authoritarian regimes continue to tighten their grip on the media.   The RSF Index, which evaluates the state of journalism in 180 countries and territories every year, shows that an intense climate of fear has been triggered, one that is prejudicial to a safe reporting environment.   The hostility towards journalists expressed by political leaders in many countries has incited increasingly serious and frequent acts of violence that have fuelled an unprecedented level of fear and danger for journalists.   'If the political debate slides surreptitiously or openly towards a civil war-style atmosphere, in which journalists are treated as scapegoats, then democracy is in great danger', RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said. 'Halting this cycle of fear and intimidation is a matter of the utmost urgency for all people of good will who value the freedoms acquired in the course of history'.   Norway is ranked first in the 2019 Index for the third year running while Finland (up two places) has taken second place from the Netherlands (down one at 4th), where two reporters who cover organized crime have had to live under permanent police protection. An increase in cyber-harassment caused Sweden (third) to lose one place. In Africa, the rankings of Ethiopia (up 40 at 110th) and Gambia (up 30 at 92nd) have significantly improved from last year's Index.   Many authoritarian regimes have fallen in the Index. They include Venezuela (down five at 148th), where journalists have been the victims of arrests and violence by security forces, and Russia (down one at 149th), where the Kremlin has used arrests, arbitrary searches and draconian laws to step up the pressure on independent media and the Internet.   At the bottom of the Index, both Vietnam (176th) and China (177th) have fallen one place, Eritrea (up 1 at 178th) is third from last, despite making peace with its neighbour Ethiopia, and Turkmenistan (down two at 180th) is now last, replacing North Korea (up one at 179th).   Only 24 percent of the 180 countries and territories are classified as 'good' (coloured white on the Press Freedom Map) or 'fairly good' (yellow), as opposed to 26 percent last year.   As a result of an increasingly hostile climate that goes beyond Donald Trump's comments, the United States (48th) has fallen three places in this year's Index and the media climate is now classified as 'problematic'.   Never before have US journalists been subjected to so many death threats or turned so often to private security firms for protection. Hatred of the media is now such that a man walked into the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, in June 2018 and opened fire, killing four journalists and one other member of the newspaper's staff. The gunman had repeatedly expressed his hatred for the paper on social networks before ultimately acting on his words.   Threats, insults and attacks are now part of the 'occupational hazards' for journalists in many countries. In India (down two at 140th), where critics of Hindu nationalism are branded as 'anti-Indian' in online harassment campaigns, six journalists were murdered in 2018. Since the election campaign in Brazil (down three at 105th), the media have been targeted by Jair Bolsonaro's supporters on both physically and online.   Courageous investigative reporters   In this climate of widespread hostility, courage is needed to continue investigating corruption, tax evasion or organized crime. In Italy (up 3 at 43rd), interior minister and League party leader Matteo Salvini suggested that journalist Roberto Saviano's police protection could be withdrawn after he criticized Salvini, while journalists and media are subjected to growing judicial harassment almost everywhere in the world, including Algeria (down 5 at 141st) and Croatia (up 5 at 64th).   Abusive judicial proceedings may be designed to gag investigative reporters by draining their financial resources, as in France or in Malta (down 12 at 77th).   They could also result in imprisonment, as in Poland (down 1 at 59th), where Gazeta Wyborcza's journalists are facing possible jail terms for linking the head of the ruling party to a questionable construction project, and in Bulgaria (11th), where two journalists were arrested after spending several months investigating the misuse of EU funds.   In addition to lawsuits and prosecutions, investigative reporters are liable to be the targets of every other kind of harassment whenever they lift the veil on corrupt practices.   A reporter's house was set on fire in Serbia (down 14 at 90th), while journalists were murdered in Malta, Slovakia (down 8 at 35th), Mexico (down 3 at 144th) and Ghana (down 4 at 27th).   The level of violence used to persecute journalists who aggravate authorities no longer seems to know any limits. Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi's gruesome murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last October sent a chilling message to journalists well beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia (down 3 at 172nd). Out of fear for their survival, many of the region's journalists censor themselves or have stopped writing altogether.   Biggest deterioration in supposedly better regions   Of all the world's regions, it is the Americas (North and South) that has suffered the greatest deterioration (3.6 percent) in its regional score measuring the level of press freedom constraints and violations. This was not just due to the poor performance of the United States, Brazil and Venezuela.   Nicaragua (114th) fell 24 places, one of the biggest in 2019. Nicaraguan journalists covering protests against President Ortega's government are treated as protesters and are often physically attacked. Many had to flee abroad to avoid being jailed on terrorism charges.   The Western Hemisphere also has one of the world's deadliest countries for the media: Mexico, where at least ten journalists were murdered in 2018. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's installation as president has reduced some of the tension between the authorities and media, but the continuing violence and impunity for murders of journalists led RSF to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court in March.   The European Union and Balkans registered the second biggest deterioration (1.7 percent) in its regional score measuring the level of constraints and violations. It is still the region where press freedom is respected most and which is, in principle, the safest, but journalists are nonetheless exposed to serious threats: to murder in Malta, Slovakia and Bulgaria (111th); to verbal and physical attacks in Serbia and Montenegro (down 1 at 104th); and to an unprecedented level of violence during the Yellow Vest protests in France (down 1 at 32nd).   Many TV crews did not dare cover the Yellow Vest protests without being accompanied by bodyguards, and others concealed their channel's logo. Journalists are also being openly stigmatized.   In Hungary (down 14 at 87th), officials in Prime Minister Viktor Orban's party Fidesz continue to refuse to speak to journalists who are not from media that are friendly to Fidesz. In Poland, the state-owned media have been turned into propaganda tools and are increasingly used to harass journalists.   Although the deterioration in its regional score was smaller, the Middle East and North Africa region continues to be the most difficult and dangerous for journalists.   Despite a slight fall in the number of journalists killed in 2018, Syria (174th) continues to be extremely dangerous for media personnel, as does Yemen (down 1 at 168th). Aside from wars and major crises, as in Libya (162nd), another major threat hangs over the region's journalists, that of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.   Iran (down 6 at 170th) is one of the world's biggest jailers of journalists. Dozens of journalists are also detained in Saudi Arabia, Egypt (down 2 at 163rd) and Bahrain (down 1 at 167th), many of them without trial.   And when they are tried, the proceedings drag on interminably, as in Morocco (135th). The one exception to this gloomy picture is Tunisia (up 15 at 97th), which has seen a big fall in the number of violations.   Africa registered the smallest deterioration in its regional score in the 2019 Index, but also some of the biggest changes in individual country rankings. After a change of government, Ethiopia (110th) freed all of its detained journalists and secured a spectacular 40-place jump in the Index. And it was thanks to a change of government that Gambia (up 30 at 92nd) also achieved one of the biggest rises in this year's Index.   But new governments have not always been good for journalists. Tanzania (down 25 at 118th) has seen unprecedented attacks on the media since John Bulldozer Magufuli's installation as president in 2015. Mauritania (down 22 at 94th) also fell sharply, in large part because the blogger Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed Mkhaitir is being held incommunicado though he should have been freed more than a year and a half ago, when his death sentence for apostasy was commuted to a jail term.   In this continent of contrasts, bad situations have continued unchanged in some countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo (154th) was again the country where RSF registered the most violations in 2018, while Somalia (164th) continued to be Africa's deadliest country for journalists.   The Eastern Europe and Central Asiaregion continues to rank second from last in the Index, the position it has held for years, despite an unusual variety of changes at the national level and a slight improvement in its regional score.   Some of the indicators used to calculate the score improved, while others deteriorated. Of the latter, it was the legal framework indicator that worsened most. More than half of the region's countries are still ranked near or below 150th in the Index.   The regional heavyweights, Russia and Turkey, continue to persecute independent media outlets. The world's biggest jailer of professional journalists, Turkey, is also the world's only country where a journalist has been prosecuted for their Paradise Papers reporting.   In this largely ossified region, rises are rare and deserve mention. Uzbekistan (up 5 at 160th) has ceased to be coloured black (the mark of a 'very bad' situation) after freeing all the journalists who were jailed under the late dictator, Islam Karimov. In Armenia (up 19 at 61st), the 'velvet revolution' has loosened the government's grip on TV channels. The size of its rise was facilitated by the fact that this is a very volatile part of the Index.   With totalitarian propaganda, censorship, intimidation, physical violence and cyber-harassment, the Asia-Pacific region continues to exhibit all of the problems that can beset journalism and, with a virtually unchanged regional score, continues to rank third from last.   The number of murdered journalists was extremely high in Afghanistan (121st), India and Pakistan (down 3 at 142nd). Disinformation is also becoming a big problem in the region. As a result of the manipulation of social networks in Myanmar, anti-Rohingya hate messages have become commonplace and the seven-year jail sentences imposed on two Reuters journalists for trying to investigate the Rohingya genocide was seen as nothing out of the ordinary.   Under China's growing influence, censorship is spreading to Singapore (151st) and Cambodia (down 1 at 143rd). In this difficult environment, the 22-place rises registered by both Malaysia (123rd) and Maldives (98th) highlight the degree to which political change can radically transform the climate for journalists, and how a country's political ecosystem can directly affect press freedom.   http://rsf.org/en/2019-world-press-freedom-index-cycle-fear http://www.thenation.com/article/david-bell-democracy-and-truth/   Oct. 2017   When the News is Bought: “Media Capture” on the Rise, reports Internews.   In many parts of the world, special interests, from oligarchs and other elites to governments, are influencing and controlling the media for personal gain. When media is captured in this way, it is no longer independent.   Captured media loses the ability to reflect the broad interests of the community and to hold power to account – the classic role of the fourth estate. Most often, media is captured by governments, plutocrats or corporations or, in many cases, a mixture of all three.   Media capture is nothing new. Internews has worked for the past 35 years in more than 100 countries to support independent media. We would be hard-pressed to find examples where media capture has not been a factor, and often a significant one.   While capture is not new, its stock is currently on the rise as it becomes a favorite tool of vested interests everywhere. As a new volume, In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy, edited by Anya Schiffrin, lays out, media capture is now a primary strategic approach for autocrats and kleptocrats and threatens democracy in every corner of the world.   There are several key reasons for this. At the top of the list is the rise of digital media. As Marquez-Ramiro and Guerrero in the volume write, “Digitization has pulverized markets, changed consumption patterns and blurred media platforms.”   As media markets transitioned to digital, the business model collapsed, making media weak and vulnerable to capture. Media became less differentiated, particularly on social platforms. As local news and smaller organizations failed or merged, markets became less diverse and increasingly consolidated. This trend is not improving.   Today, Google and Facebook consume 85 cents of every dollar spent on digital advertising, leaving very little left for media organizations to share.   At the same time as the digital transition, the 2008 global recession created a further erosion in many media markets, particularly in Europe and Eurasia, where markets have concentrated and oligarchs have been on a media buying spree.   http://www.internews.org/index.php/opinion/when-news-bought-media-capture-rise http://www.cima.ned.org/resource/service-power-media-capture-threat-democracy/ Visit the related web page
	Regulate social media now. The future of democracy is at stake by Margaret Sullivan, Anne Applebaum Washington Post, ProPublica, agencies   Mar. 2019   Social media platforms have a responsibility to monitor hate and violence on their platforms, writes Margaret Sullivan.   Right from the twisted start, those who plotted to kill worshipers at two New Zealand mosques depended on the passive incompetence of Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms.   They depended on the longtime priorities of the tech giants who, for years, have concentrated on maximising revenue, not protecting safety or decency. They got it.   Many hours after the massacre, a horrific 17-minute video showing a man in black shooting with a semi-automatic rifle at those running from mosques and shooting into piles of bodies could still be easily accessed on YouTube.   My colleague, Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell, summed up the social media disaster succinctly in a tweet: "The New Zealand massacre was live-streamed on Facebook, announced on 8chan, reposted on YouTube, commented about on Reddit, and mirrored around the world before the tech companies could even react."   It gets worse. The brutality that killed at least 49 people and wounded many others was fuelled and fomented on social media inviting support and, no doubt, inspiring future copy cats.   One of the suspects had posted a 74-page manifesto railing against Muslims and immigrants, making it clear he was following the example of those like Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina.   All of it ricocheted around the globe, just as planned.   The platforms, when challenged on their role in viral violence, tend to say that there is no way they can control the millions of videos, documents and statements being uploaded or posted every hour around the world. They respond when they can, which is often with agonising slowness and far too late.   And they insist on presenting themselves not as media companies with some sort of gatekeeping or editing responsibility, but as mere platforms places for their billions of users to do pretty much what they wish.   To the extent that the companies do control content, they depend on low-paid moderators or on faulty algorithms. Meanwhile, they put tremendous resources and ingenuity - including the increasing use of artificial intelligence - into their efforts to maximise clicks and advertising revenue.   This is far from the first time acts of violence have been posted in real time. Since Facebook's live-video tool began in 2015, it's been used to simulcast murder, child abuse and every sort of degradation.   But the tragedy in New Zealand takes this dangerous and largely untended situation to a new level that demands intense scrutiny and reform.   Granted, there are tough issues here, including those involving free speech and the free flow of information on the internet.   Reddit, for one, often takes the view that its users deserve to be treated like grown-ups, to see what they want to see.   As its representatives on Friday closed down a thread called "watchpeopledie," where users commented on the massacre video, they sounded regretful:   "The video is being scrubbed from major social-media platforms, but hopefully Reddit believes in letting you decide for yourself whether or not you want to see unfiltered reality," the post said. "Regardless of what you believe, this is an objective look into a terrible incident like this."   Where are the lines between censorship and responsibility? These are issues that major news companies have been dealing with for their entire existences, what photos and videos to publish, what profanity to include. Editorial judgment, often flawed, is not only possible. It's necessary.   The scale and speed of the digital world obviously complicates that immensely. But saying, in essence, "we can't help it" and "that's not our job" are not acceptable answers.   Friday's massacre should force the major platforms, which are really media companies, though they don't want to admit it, to get serious.   As violence goes more and more viral, tech companies need to deal with the crisis that they have helped create.   They must figure out ways to be responsible global citizens as well as profit-making machines.   Feb. 2019   Regulate social media now. The future of democracy is at stake, by Anne Applebaum.   A few days ago, ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit newsroom, discovered that a tool it was using to track political advertising on Facebook had been quietly disabled by Facebook. The browser extension had detected political ad campaigns and gathered details on the ads target audiences. Facebook also tracks political ad campaigns, but sometimes it fails to detect them. For the past year, the company had accepted corrections from ProPublica until one day it decided it didn't want them anymore. It also seems like they don't wish for there to be information about the targeting of political advertising, an editor at ProPublica told me.   Facebook also made news in recent days for another tool: an app, this time its own, designed to give the company access to extensive information about how consumers were using their telephones. Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, has defended the project vigorously, on the grounds that those who signed up to use this research app knew what they were doing and were paid $20 a month. Unamused, Apple decided to intervene and has now banned the app from its phones.   Both of these stories have something in common: They illustrate who is making the rules of our new information network and it isn't us. It isn't citizens, or Congress, who decide how our information network regulates itself. We don't get to decide how information companies collect data, and we don't get to decide how transparent they should be. The tech companies do that all by themselves.   Why does it matter? Because this is the information network that now brings most people their news and opinions about politics, about medicine, about the economy. This is also the information network that is fueling polarization, that favors sensational news over constructive news and that has destroyed the business model of local and investigative journalism. The past few days have also brought news of staff layoffs at newspapers around the country, from Arizona to Tennessee to New Jersey.   I have singled out Facebook here because it is the dominant force in social media, like an old-fashioned monopolist, it owns Instagram and WhatsApp, too but I could write similarly about Google, which is the dominant force in Internet search, or YouTube, which is owned by Google and is the dominant force in the distribution of video content.   These companies also operate according to their own rules and algorithms. They decide how data gets collected and who sees it. They decide how political and commercial advertising is regulated and monitored. They even decide what gets censored. The public sphere is shaped by these decisions, but the public has no say.   There is a precedent for this historical moment. In the 1920s and 1930s, democratic governments suddenly found themselves challenged by radio, the new information technology of its time. Radio's early stars included Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin: The technology could clearly be used to provoke anger and violence. But was there a way to marshal it for the purposes of democracy instead? One answer was the British Broadcasting Corp., the BBC, which was designed from the beginning to reach all parts of the country, to 'inform, educate and entertain' and to join people together, not in a single set of opinions but in the kind of single national conversation that made democracy possible.   Another set of answers was found in the United States, where journalists accepted a regulatory framework, a set of rules about libel law and a public process that determined who could get a radio license.   The question now is to find the equivalent of licensing and public broadcasting in the world of social media: to find, that is, the regulatory or social or legal measures that will make this technology work for us, for our society and our democracy, and not just for Facebook shareholders. This is not an argument in favor of censorship. It's an argument in favor of applying to the online world the same kinds of regulations that have been used in other spheres, to set rules on transparency, privacy, data and competition.   We can, for example, regulate Internet advertising, just as we regulate broadcast advertising, insisting that people know when and why they are being shown political ads or, indeed, any ads. We can curb the anonymity of the Internet - recent research shows that the number of fake accounts on Facebook may be far higher than what the company has stated in public - because we have a right to know whether we are interacting with real people or bots. In the longer term, there may be even more profound solutions. What would a public-interest algorithm look like, for example, or a form of social media that favored constructive conversations over polarization?   We could make a start with Sen. Amy Klobuchar's (D-Minn.) proposed bill on honesty in advertising. But the debate needs to be deeper; it cannot include another chaotic, amateurish interview with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in the Senate. Constantly changing technology will make it difficult, as will lobbying. But we have regulated financial markets, another sphere where the technology changes constantly, the money involved is enormous, everyone is lobbying, and everyone is trying to cheat.   If we don't do it, if we don't even try, we will not be able to ensure the integrity of elections or the decency of the public sphere. If we don't do it, in the long term there won't even be a public sphere, and there won't be functional democracies anymore, either.   * Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a professor of practice at the London School of Economics.   http://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-antitrust-watchdog-restricts-facebooks-data-collection-via-other-sites/a-47402737 http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/facebook-fake-news-investigation-report-regulation-privacy-law-dcms http://www.christchurchcall.com/call.html http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/studio/multimedia/20190606-speech-police-global-struggle-govern-internet-david-kaye http://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/about/2018-justice-free-expression-conference/ http://globalvoices.org/2019/06/27/what-will-it-take-to-combat-digital-authoritarianism-in-southeast-asia/ Visit the related web page
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