The fragile freedom of the press

Manager: This is an editorial from Dagbladet, and expresses the newspaper’s view. Dagbladet’s political editor is responsible for the editorial.

The annual press freedom index from the organization Reporters without Borders is depressing reading. Only 8 of the 180 countries on the list receive the characteristic “good”. Even countries such as the USA, Great Britain, Iceland and Germany end up in the category below, with the grade “satisfactory”. A number of countries achieve a weakened rating and almost half of the measured countries end up in the red zone, meaning that they have a freedom of the press in the “very serious” category. Russia, North Korea and China are of course among them.

Norway ends up at the top again. It may be deserved, but every day there are also small and large battles about freedom of expression and information. Norway is clocked in at a score of 91.89 out of 100. This indicates that there is a lot to go on, especially because the drop is more than 3 points since last year. In addition to Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Ireland, Portugal and the Netherlands are also completely green on the press freedom map.

Some of the pressure against press freedom comes from mass-generated messages in social media, which – among other things with the help of artificial intelligence – spread falsehoods that threaten the safety of individual journalists and the credibility of journalism. Reporters Without Borders uses Slovakia as an example of an affected state. This year, the country falls from 17th to 29th place on the index.

Two days before the election last year, a fake recording was spread on social media. The recording allegedly sounds as if a high-profile journalist is talking to the leader of an extremist party about planning electoral fraud. The problem is that the entire recording is fake and it has been superimposed on a sound with an artificially generated voice similarity to the journalist.

Also in Norway is there are examples of conditions which in various ways have a cooling effect on the debate climate. It is also a long way until our own authorities can beat their chests. Last winter, authorization laws were passed for use in pandemics and the like, which restrict the population’s control over the authorities.

Furthermore, it was only at the last minute, after a year of warnings, that the authorities dropped a proposal that would make a number of internal documents unavailable to the public. As recently as last week, it became known that the government is in favor of limiting the media’s access to election results on election day. The funny thing is that someone wants to remove it without it ever actually being stated that this is a problem. Perhaps it is a small matter, but it is precisely such actions that show how fragile the freedom of the press is even with a “world champion”.