Briefly clearing the smell of mendacity

It seems fairly obvious, unless you take seriously the echo chamber of the left, and the raving madness of conspiracists when the only people they can accuse of oppressiveness is the societies they grew up in, and for reasons of adolescent immaturity hate. A sample:

No doubt the influence of the Knights of Columbus with its membership of 1.5 million means that the American press is not free to report on matters that threaten the security-survival of the Papacy. But as if this were not sufficient, in recent years a new organization has been created to serve as the point of attack on the American freedom of the press -- the Catholic League for Religion and Civil Rights. The next chapter is devoted to a survey of the League's chilling effect on this freedom in the 1990s.

Henceforth, their name shall be “the Bongmeisters”...


What IS obvious is where the press is clearly not free. Hard on the heels of a BBC/Reuters fearfully circumspect poll by Globescan asking where their own believability lies, a study finds the least free environments for speech, and the worst of them have either the totalitarian necklace of Socialism around their neck, or factions of Jihadists who are actively hostile to freedom of speech:

The list of worst offenders ranges around the world, also including Libya and Eritrea in Africa; Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, and Syria.

"North Korea is the world's deepest information void," said CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper, whose group prepared the list to coincide with World Press Freedom Day today. Not only do all journalists work for the Korean Central News Agency, she said, but all radios in the country are made so they can only pick up government-run stations.

The CPJ panel that compiled the list apparently had no shortage of candidates. Governments routinely associated with strict press controls, such as China, Zimbabwe, Iran and Ethiopia, didn't even make the list. Nor did countries where journalists are intimidated, injured or killed for their work, such as Iraq, Congo, Lebanon, Egypt and Pakistan.

Miss Cooper said that all the countries on the list are run by dictators, have almost no independent media, and severely restrict Internet usage where it is available at all.

Funny enough – the BBC in revising the reporting of the story they made by commissioning a poll was quick to play down why so many Americans no longer trust the press Far from a matter of being free, the problem is that much of their product is bought from and sold to the U.S.

The fuse is lit!