FRENCH AT IT AGAIN IN LATEST REPORT ON PRESS FREEDOMS

Saturday, November 1, 2003

Another day, another international comparison rigged to make the United States and Israel look bad.

This one is from Reporters sans Frontieres, a Paris-based organization that, by its own description, ``defends imprisoned journalists and press freedom throughout the world'' (at rsf.org on the Web). Its second ``world press freedom ranking,'' issued Oct. 20, covers ``a total of 166 countries.''

But actually it doesn't. The United States, which ranks 31st, and Israel, 44th, are ``singled out for actions beyond their borders'' as the report itself confesses. The United States is chided for its ``unacceptable behavior'' in Iraq, which the report spells out as ``the U.S. army's responsibility in the death of several reporters during the war.'' It falls to 135th, right behind Liberia and Afghanistan.

I'd have thought that the most important aspect of press freedom in Iraq is that now there is some. Fifty or more newspapers are being published in Baghdad, maybe twice that many. Though American authorities closed one of them because it was inciting violence, even here at home under the First Amendment that is not protected speech. But Reporters sans Frontieres condemned them for it anyway.

Israel is blamed for ``the Israeli army's repeated abuses against journalists in the occupied territories.'' There are reasonable grounds for concern there, but at 146th, Israel is ranked worse than the Palestinian Authority itself, not to mention hellholes like Zimbabwe.

What can these people be thinking?

Actually they're French. We know what they're thinking.

Usually at this point in dissecting one of these silly efforts it is time to explain the idiocy inherent in converting a wide variety of disparate measures into numbers and then averaging the numbers as if the result meant something. Even if the people doing it strive to be free of bias, which is often not the case, there are so many ways to go astray in figuring out how to do the conversions (which in effect determines how the various measures are weighted) that the results are significant only in the most general sense.

You can usefully break countries into a small number of roughly similar groups. The Heritage Foundation does that with its yearly Index of Economic Freedom, in order to make the point that economic freedom is strongly correlated with economic prosperity and to suggest to countries who want more prosperity that allowing more freedom is a good strategy.

But the only point this outfit makes about a connection between press freedom and a county's wealth is to carp that they ``don't always go together'' as if anyone should expect that the two would be perfectly correlated.

That usual caution still applies, but what's worse is that this report does not say, except in vague terms, what the measures are or how they are weighted. In the section on how the ranking was compiled, it explains that the organization designed a questionnaire covering 53 criteria for press freedom that they sent to a hand-picked group of ``journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists'' -- people whom they credit with a ``deep knowledge'' of the press in one or more countries. The questionnaire takes account, the report says, of violations that affect journalists, ``such as murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats,'' the news media, ``censorship, confiscation of issues, searches and harassment,'' and other issues including Internet access.

We wouldn't expect them to publish the names of their respondents, because in some of these countries it would be very dangerous to have one's opinion of the government on record. But the opportunity to stack the deck is only too evident. Suppose America's ranking is based on the bilious opinions of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore and their like?

At the least, the report should include the questionnaire, say how many people in each country answered it, and explain how answers were translated into numbers. As it is, the numerical score apparently runs from zero to 100, with two decimal places converted from twelfths. The lowest (best) score is 0.50, shared by the Netherlands and three Scandinavian countries; the worst is North Korea at 99.50. Approximately a third of the list is under 10.00. The United States is at 6.00, tied with Greece; Israel is at 8.00, tied with Japan.

Is that reasonable? Who knows? But Trinidad and Tobago at 1.00? Slovenia at 3.00? Timor-Leste at 5.50, just ahead of the United States? It's very odd. And Canada, which has no First Amendment and consequently has a far worse problem with government censorship of the press than we do, comes in at 1.83. So much for ``deep knowledge.''

This looks to be an annual exercise, unfortunately. Unless they do a better job, they're wasting their time and ours.