Freedom of Speech on a Global Scale



"People have a need to know. Journalists have a right to tell. Finding the facts can be difficult. Reporting the story can be dangerous. Freedom includes the right to be outrageous. Responsibility includes the duty to be fair. News is history in the making. Journalists provide the first draft of history."

One highlight of my recent trek up the East Coast was stopping in Washington, D.C., home of many of the nation's great museums. One such museum is the Newseum, which, as the name implies, hosts a large number of news-related exhibitions, which include a Pulitzer Prize photographs hall, a First Amendment gallery and a 9/11 memorial. One exhibition that I found to be of particular relevance to global affairs was the Time Warner World News Gallery, dedicated to shedding light on how free speech (or the lack thereof) dictates the struggles of journalists around the world.

The gallery features an interactive map (similar to this one by Reporters Without Borders) that designates an "index of freedom" to every country based in part on how that nation has censored, pressured or otherwise oppressed journalists in the recent past. Some of the designations include Mexico at 63 points, the U.S. at 86 points and Spain at 94 points (for reference, Norway held first place with a laudable perfect freedom rating of 100 points, and North Korea last place with a measly 3 points). While such scoring is seemingly arbitrary, it aids in the quick comparison of nations and ultimately serves as a reminder of how little of the world lives under a free press.



At the end of the exhibit stands a large panel covered in the portraits of murdered journalists, a testament to just how far much of the world is from achieving true freedom of speech. This memorial is a "work in progress".

Sources:

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2019/democracy-in-retreat
https://rsf.org/en/ranking
https://www.newseum.org/exhibits/current/time-warner-world-news-gallery/

Comments

  1. PZhou2011 July 2019 at 15:06

    Fascinating stuff, Alex. Nice job on this blog post!

    ReplyDelete

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