In the biggest global election year in history, the 2024 World Press Freedom Index shows a chilling pattern of political disregard for journalists’ safety — from Europe to the Middle East.
By Carmen Molina Acosta
Governments worldwide are failing to protect — and frequently cracking down on — independent media in 2024, casting a shadow over Reporters Without Borders’ annual press freedom rankings in a major global election year.
The nonprofit, known as RSF, which advocates for journalists and media workers, publishes the World Press Freedom Index to mark World Press Freedom Day. The index scores countries and territories based on five indicators: political support and respect, security, economic constraints, legislative environments, and sociocultural factors. Of the five, the political indicator dropped the most since December 2022, averaging a fall of 7.6 points worldwide.
“States and other political forces are playing a decreasing role in protecting press freedom,” Anne Bocandé, RSF’s editorial director, said in a statement. “This disempowerment sometimes goes hand in hand with more hostile actions that undermine the role of journalists, or even instrumentalise the media through campaigns of harassment or disinformation.”
Intimidation and censorship of journalists, disinformation campaigns, widespread distrust in media, sluggish regulation of generative AI to prevent political deepfakes, and government restrictions on social media all contributed to worsening conditions for journalists in 2023, RSF found. The index is intended to give a snapshot of the previous calendar year.
Russia, despite the war in Ukraine, rose two places in the rankings to 162nd “due to other countries falling,” obscuring a drop in its overall score. More than 1,500 journalists have fled the country since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the number of journalists branded “foreign agents” or “undesirable” by the Kremlin is growing. In the Middle East, Israel’s standing has declined, with its classification shifting from “problematic” to “difficult” over its moves to suppress reporting from Gaza since the start of the war in the strip, and Israeli Defense Forces killing Palestinian and Lebanese journalists.
