- The United States dropped 27 places - to a tie with Romania - in the Reporters Without Borders 2011-2012 Press Freedom Index, after dozens of journalists were arrested for covering the Occupy Wall Street protests. Now ranked 47th, the United States shares its spot with Romania and Argentina, just below Taiwan and higher than Latvia.
- What Happened to Canada?
- The war on WikiLeaks: A John Pilger investigation and interview with Julian Assange
Adam Klasfeld, Courthouse News Service
Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Jeanette Eastman
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Police confront protesters outside 2010's G-20 meeting in Toronto, Canada, June 25, 2010. (Photo: G20 Protest Photos)
The United States dropped 27 places - to a tie with Romania - in the Reporters Without Borders 2011-2012 Press Freedom Index, after dozens of journalists were arrested for covering the Occupy Wall Street protests. Now ranked 47th, the United States shares its spot with Romania and Argentina, just below Taiwan and higher than Latvia. "I think the Occupy Wall Street arrests were our biggest concern," the organization's Washington, D.C. director Delphine Halgand told Courthouse News in a telephone interview. The 19-page report chided governments around the world for clamping down on protests, opening this year's report with the caption: "Crackdowns on Protests Cause Big Changes to Index Positions."
"Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011," the report states. "Never has freedom of information been so closely associated with democracy. Never have journalists, through their reporting, vexed the enemies of freedom so much. Never have acts of censorship and physical attacks on journalists seemed so numerous. The equation is simple: the absence or suppression of civil liberties leads necessarily to the suppression of media freedom. Dictatorships fear and ban information, especially when it may undermine them."
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What Happened to Canada? Chris Hedges, truthout
Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Jeanette Eastman
What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable.
The war on WikiLeaks: A John Pilger investigation and interview with Julian Assange, John Pilger, johnpilger.com
Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Jeanette Eastman
The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders, in politics and journalism.
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The January 31 
A Media Matters analysis shows that as a whole, news coverage of the Keystone XL pipeline between August 1 and December 31 favored pipeline proponents. Although the project would create few long-term employment opportunities, the pipeline was primarily portrayed as a jobs issue. Pro-pipeline voices were quoted more frequently than those opposed, and dubious industry estimates of job creation were uncritically repeated 5 times more often than they were questioned. Meanwhile, concerns about the State Department's review process and potential environmental consequences were often overlooked, particularly by television outlets.
A case for facts, statistics, and common sense. Let's be #OPEN about it.
