Page 8 - bne IntelliNews Newspaper 280417

bne Chart
April 28, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 8
Picture for media freedom increasingly bleak
bne IntelliNews
Turkey continued its dramatic decline on Report- ers Without Borders’ latest World Press Free- dom Index, which documents an alarming fall
in media freedom in many countries around the world. Also known as Reporters sans frontieres or RSF, the media watchdog highlights that some Eurasian countries maintain some of the most repressive regimes for journalists globally.
The annually published index ranks 180 coun- tries according to the level of freedom experi- enced by journalists. Rankings are based on the journalism watchdog’s evaluation of pluralism, independence of the media, quality of legisla- tive framework and safety of journalists in each country. This year saw the situation worsen in nearly two-thirds of the countries on the index.
On the 2017 index, Turkey fell a further four places to 155th, after dropping by a total of 57 places in the past 12 years. “The coup attempt in July 2016 swept aside the last restraints on the government in its war against critical media,” says the report. “The ensuing state of emergen- cy has allowed the authorities to disband dozens of media outlets at the stroke of a pen, month
after month, reducing pluralism to a handful of low-circulation newspapers.”
Turkey is the lowest ranked country in Europe by a considerable margin, but two other countries – Bulgaria and Macedonia – sit alongside Turkey in the “Difficult Situation” category (the second- worst of the five defined by RSF), even though both made marginal improvements in their rankings on the 2017 index.
Globally, RSF warns of an increase in the num- ber of countries (coloured black on the map) where the media freedom situation is “Very Bad”. 21 countries now fall into this category, including Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
But for the most part, the CEE countries are a bright spot among the wider region of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, with the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia all in the second-best category of “Satisfactory Situation”. From the region only Estonia was rated as having a “Good Situation”, which placed it above many Western European nations.