Truthy Heights

Looks like the world will need new and interesting EUphemisms for European notions of journalism. John Rosenthal reports further on just how Reporters Without Borders is singing for their dinner.

A heading on the Web page for the RSF index promising "Evaluation by region" gives one hope for finding something more to chew on. The heading is followed by links for "Americas," "Asia," "Africa," "Europe" and "Middle East." Anyone clicking on those links, however, will discover that they lead to exactly the same 1373-word press release, with merely the subtitles changed! A more brazen expression of RSF's disinterest in providing a detailed justification for its rankings would hardly be possible.

In addition to the press release, RSF provides a brief note on "How the index was compiled" -- pompously titled a "methodological note" in the French version. The note is barely 400 words long. It begins: "The Reporters Without Borders index measures the state of press freedom in the world. It reflects the degree of freedom that journalists and news organisations enjoy in each country. . . ." Consisting almost exclusively of such bland assurances, the note contains virtually nothing that would merit the description of a "methodology." The only relevant piece of information one learns from RSF's "methodological note," is that RSF's rankings are supposed to be based on the responses to a questionnaire sent out by RSF "to its network of 130 correspondents around the world, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists." Just how these responses are supposed to have been converted into the numerical "score" that determines the rank of each country in the index, we are not told.

In effect, it’s an opinion poll on the like-minded, and like-funded sort. It has nothing to do with incidents of press harassment itself, and were one to look for information as to just what it is that the judicial bodies of nations targeted in this report need to work on, leaves far too much to the imagination. Nothing is cited.

John goes nation by nation using RSF’s own standards of what press freedom is to demonstrate that the outcome is clearly tilted in the favor of the European nation states that fund RSF

The first 19 places in the RSF index are occupied by small, mostly European, countries whose excellent "performance" is unlikely to be begrudged by any of the larger global powers that battle it out for legitimacy and influence on the world stage: "consensus" candidates, so to say.

The first major power to appear in the ranking is Germany in 20th place -- some 28 places in front of the United States. In the six years that RSF has published its Press Freedom Index, Germany has never ranked below 23rd and it has always been ranked first among the EU "big three" powers (Germany, France and the United Kingdom) and well above all other major world powers: most notably, the United States. During this same period, both investigative journalists and media commentators have been subjected to a degree of interference and harassment by organs of the German state that would be unthinkable in the United States. The numerous episodes of press harassment and interference have included spying on journalists, police raids on editorial offices, and criminal investigations. Virtually any of these cases, had they occurred in the United States, would undoubtedly have been enduring front page stories -- not only in the newspapers of reference in the United States itself, but also in Germany and the rest of Europe -- and led to a (further) precipitous decline in the United States' ranking in the RSF Press Freedom Index.

In April of this year, the German television news magazine Panorama reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, and the German Federal Office for Criminal Investigation, or BKA, had mounted a joint surveillance operation against journalists of the German news weekly Focus between 2002 and 2004. Focus has been the venue of numerous explosive revelations on German intelligence operations: notably in connection with the Iraq War and Germany's highly ambiguous stance toward the American-led "War on Terror." It came out in 2005 that the BND had pursued spying operations against Focus reporter Josef Hufelschulte and the freelance journalist and intelligence expert Erich Schmidt-Eenboom starting in the mid-1990s.

Also afoot today: a finding is expected on the France2-Enderlin case concerning the staged coverage of the death of a Palestinian child.

Today — November 14 — the public will finally be able to view the 27 minutes of raw footage of the death of Mohammed Al Dura and determine whether or not it was a fake. Or will they?

[ ... ]

France 2 refused to hand over the original film but a court order last month by the French court of appeals forces the station to air the 27 minutes of raw footage--which actually consists of staged scenes of Palestinians pretending to be shot, according to the few journalists who previously saw it.

But just when we thought the truth would finally be revealed, France 2 is backtracking again. Enderlin now is telling Jerusalem Post, there were never 27 minutes of raw footage

What else did you expect?