Global press freedom deteriorated last year as political turmoil or drug violence engulfed emerging democracies like Thailand and Mexico and authoritarian China and Russia tightened controls, a US annual survey said on Thursday.
Freedom House, which has been conducting such polls since 1980, said last year marked the eighth straight year of deterioration of media freedom, with setbacks in nearly every region creating a situation in which only one in six people in the world live in countries with a free press.
“While there were some positive developments, particularly in South Asia, significant declines were recorded in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East,” said Freedom House, a watchdog group funded by private and Western government donations.
Behind the declines, the worst since 1996, was strife in a number of countries that threatened independent reporting, including drug wars in Mexico; political coups in Honduras, Guinea and Niger; and political strife in Thailand, it said.
With China, Russia and Venezuela boosting already strong controls on media, Freedom House said “the year was notable for intensified efforts by authoritarian regimes to place restrictions on all conduits for news and information.”
“The Chinese regime has become a world leader in the development of new and more sophisticated methods of information control,” said the report, compiled before the US search engine Google Corp quit the China market in a dispute over censorship.
Freedom House also warned of “globalization of censorship” because some methods of control have crossed borders.
Beijing pressed overseas film festivals and book fairs to ban appearances or works by China’s critics and Islamic nations have united to try to restrict speech by including antiblasphemy codes in international human rights law, it said.
In a practice it called “libel tourism,” foreign business and political figures used Britain’s expansive libel laws to quash critical research or commentary by journalists and scholars, the report said.
Of the 196 countries and territories assessed last year, 69 were rated Free, 64 were rated Partly Free and 63 were rated Not Free.
By country, the “worst of the worst” last year, with minimal or nonexistent media freedom were Belarus, Myanmar, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the survey said.
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