Press freedom USA

Sure! Why not? What does that really mean though? I'd expect the more "modern" countries to go on a downward slide in their ratings since they are including things like Internet flitering and accountability for blog postings in their ratings now. Countries that don't have Internet access widely available probbaly don't have to worry to much about those sorts of things. If no one has it there is no need for anyone to influence or contol it.

I do find it interesting that they don't list the points assigned for each of the 50 questions rated for each country and the rationale for them though. They do list 3 or 4 specifics in the main text but even those are questionable (The Josh Wolf story being one of them).

I find it hard to be all to concerned with it since they consider pretty much everyone that writes something down as a journalist (by their criteria, pretty much anyone with a MySpace page is a journalist...) and any "pressure" from any source to report news in any particular way as an infringement on freedom. That seems like an awfully lose criteria.

At least this year they finally gave the public access to what the 50 questions were that the ratings were based on. Maybe in the future they'll be as open about their ratings as they think governments should be with information they want.