Reporters Without Borders’s Global Press Freedom Index tracks actions against news media.

America’s ranks 53rd on press freedom. We’re between Tonga and Uruguay.

Home of “freedom of the press,” the United States entered the list – when it started in 2002 – at 17th place. We fell nine places just since last year.

“The steady erosion of press freedom in the United States, France and Japan is extremely alarming,” Reporters Without Borders said. They particularly concerned this year about how some Western democracies, including ours, impose punishments on media that criticize political leaders.

A couple of examples:

Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf was imprisoned when he refused to hand over his video archives. Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, who works for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, has been held without trial since June 2002 at the US military base at Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been held by US authorities in Iraq since April this year.

They also point out that the federal courts refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, and even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism. More details on the freedom of the press issues in the Americas is available in pdf format.

“Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of ‘national security’ to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his ‘war on terrorism.'”

Relations between journalists and the White House aren’t the biggest kind of problem. On network news, it looks an awful lot like they are reading press releases half the time. How about paid advertising presented as news? How about disinformation, propaganda, and censorship by the Bush Administration and corporate interests?

Here are the top ten countries for press freedom:

• Finland
• Iceland
• Ireland
• Netherlands
• Czech Republic
• Estonia
• Norway
• Slovakia
• Switzerland
• Hungary

I remember that there was some other credible ranking list on the topic of freedom of the press. It went back further than 5 years, and was tracked by a US group – but I can’t remember it now, and wasn’t able to find it on a search.

Comment if you know.