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Photo for representation. (REUTERS)
The United States ranked 45 on the group’s list, behind countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean.
- AFP Paris
- Last update: April 21, 2020 3:39 PM IST
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders is sounding the alarm that the coronavirus pandemic poses a threat to press freedom worldwide.
In its annual assessment of global media freedoms, the group warned on Tuesday that the health crisis could serve as an excuse for governments “to take advantage of the fact that politics is suspended, the public is stunned and protests are out of the question. ” to impose measures that would be impossible in normal times. “
North Korea was last in the group’s press freedom index. As in 2019, Norway again topped its ranking of 180 countries and territories.
Overall, the report deemed press freedom “satisfactory” in the United States, but also said that “public denigration, threats and harassment of journalists continued to be a serious problem” last year.
The United States ranked 45 on the group’s list, behind countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean.
The report highlighted the hostility of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, towards some journalists and the media and said that his phrase “false news” often displayed “has now been deployed by leaders around the world as a tool to take cracking down on the media. ”
Hostility towards journalists and the media in the United States escalated and intensified, and few attacks were as viral as those that came from the president, “the group said.
“The abuse is only getting worse amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, as journalists covering the Trump administration’s response to the crisis are subject to attacks by the president during his press conferences.”
Other threats to the future of journalism are economic, with job cuts destroying newsrooms, the group said.
And the weak regulation of digital technologies has “created an information chaos, blurring the lines between fact, fiction, propaganda and publicity.”
“The pandemic amplified the spread of rumors and fake news as fast as the virus itself,” the report noted.
“In order for this decisive decade not to be disastrous, people of good will, whoever they are, must campaign so that journalists can fulfill their role as reliable third parties in society,” he said.
