Part II: The RSF Rankings
In light of the casualness with which media organizations and "human rights" groups regularly cite the Press Freedom rankings of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), one might well expect RSF's Press Freedom Index to be accompanied by a detailed report explaining how the organization established its rankings and providing a summary analysis of the situation of press freedoms of each of the 169 countries included. This would surely not be too much to expect of an organization disposing of an annual budget of nearly four million euros: much of which, as shown in Part I of this exposé, derives from public French and EU sources. Anyone looking for such a report from RSF, however, will be disappointed. The RSF Press Freedom Index is merely accompanied by a seven-page press release. Four of the seven pages, however, are taken up by a reproduction in tabular form of the index itself. This leaves RSF's discursive presentation of its results topping out at all of two-and-a-half pages or some 1373 words (in the English version): less than half the length of the present article.
A heading on the Web page for the RSF index promising "Evaluation by region" gives one hope for finding something more to chew on. The heading is followed by links for "Americas," "Asia," "Africa," "Europe" and "Middle East." Anyone clicking on those links, however, will discover that they lead to exactly the same 1373-word press release, with merely the subtitles changed! A more brazen expression of RSF's disinterest in providing a detailed justification for its rankings would hardly be possible.
In addition to the press release, RSF provides a brief note on "How the index was compiled" -- pompously titled a "methodological note" in the French version. The note is barely 400 words long. It begins: "The Reporters Without Borders index measures the state of press freedom in the world. It reflects the degree of freedom that journalists and news organisations enjoy in each country. . . ." Consisting almost exclusively of such bland assurances, the note contains virtually nothing that would merit the description of a "methodology." The only relevant piece of information one learns from RSF's "methodological note," is that RSF's rankings are supposed to be based on the responses to a questionnaire sent out by RSF "to its network of 130 correspondents around the world, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists." Just how these responses are supposed to have been converted into the numerical "score" that determines the rank of each country in the index, we are not told. We are merely told reassuringly that the RSF has "devised a scale" for this purpose. The questionnaire is made available on the RSF Web site. The responses are not, nor are the names of the persons whose opinions are supposed to have been surveyed.
RSF's lack of transparency concerning both its primary "data" and the "method" ostensibly employed for converting the latter into the concrete "scores" assigned to the individual countries, obviously leaves the organization an extremely large -- indeed virtually unlimited -- margin for arbitrariness in establishing its rankings. A closer look at the RSF rankings shows that it has made ample use of this margin. We will focus here on three prominent examples that are of obvious interest for RSF's European sponsors.
Germany
The first 19 places in the RSF index are occupied by small, mostly European, countries whose excellent "performance" is unlikely to be begrudged by any of the larger global powers that battle it out for legitimacy and influence on the world stage: "consensus" candidates, so to say.
The first major power to appear in the ranking is Germany in 20th place -- some 28 places in front of the United States. In the six years that RSF has published its Press Freedom Index, Germany has never ranked below 23rd and it has always been ranked first among the EU "big three" powers (Germany, France and the United Kingdom) and well above all other major world powers: most notably, the United States. During this same period, both investigative journalists and media commentators have been subjected to a degree of interference and harassment by organs of the German state that would be unthinkable in the United States. The numerous episodes of press harassment and interference have included spying on journalists, police raids on editorial offices, and criminal investigations. Virtually any of these cases, had they occurred in the United States, would undoubtedly have been enduring front page stories -- not only in the newspapers of reference in the United States itself, but also in Germany and the rest of Europe -- and led to a (further) precipitous decline in the United States' ranking in the RSF Press Freedom Index.
In April of this year, the German television news magazine Panorama reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, and the German Federal Office for Criminal Investigation, or BKA, had mounted a joint surveillance operation against journalists of the German news weekly Focus between 2002 and 2004. Focus has been the venue of numerous explosive revelations on German intelligence operations: notably in connection with the Iraq War and Germany's highly ambiguous stance toward the American-led "War on Terror." It came out in 2005 that the BND had pursued spying operations against Focus reporter Josef Hufelschulte and the freelance journalist and intelligence expert Erich Schmidt-Eenboom starting in the mid-1990s.
The Panorama report likewise revealed that the Munich Public Prosecutors Office had opened a criminal investigation against Hufelschulte for "Aiding and Abetting in the Betrayal of State Secrets" (Beihilfe zum Geheimnisverrat). Note that this peculiar legal construct permits the prosecution not only of state officials who leak classified information to the media, but also of the journalists who report the information. It does not require much imagination to envisage the large number of, for example, New York Times reporters who would become the subject of criminal investigations if American prosecutors had a similar "tool" at their disposal.
In September 2005, the editorial offices of the German intellectual monthly Cicero were raided by the police in connection with an investigation into suspected "Aiding and Abetting in the Betrayal of State Secrets." This followed the publication in the April issue of the magazine of an article by author Bruno Schirra on the, in the meanwhile deceased, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Police likewise raided Schirra's home: carting away some hundred files and dossiers, representing, on the author's account (Netzeitung, Oct. 12, 2005), the totality of his research archives. Udo Ulfkotte, the author of numerous books on both the BND and Islamist networks in Germany, was likewise the target of a lengthy criminal investigation on suspicion of having "Aided and Abetted the Betrayal of State Secrets." Both Ulfkotte's home and his wife's offices were repeatedly raided by the police. (For his first-hand account of the experience, see "The World - Upside-Down.")
Next Page: German coverage of the Al-Masri case . . .
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