Press Freedom Index Relative Rankings 2003-2016

• Report rights infringement
• published: 11 May 2016
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https://rsf.org/en https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index Brief summary and methodology: Reporters Without Borders releases the annual “Press Freedom Index” every year since 2002. According to RFS, this index tries to assess the degree of press freedom that journalist, news organization and netizens enjoy in each country. The index shows a numeric value that is inversely proportional to the press freedom measured in a country, i.e. a lower number means a better press freedom. This index, regardless of its symbolic and politic value, seemed to me a good candidate to make a first test with the Python library Basemap. The goal was to create a short animation to follow the evolution of press freedom in the world through the years. However, there is a fundamental problem with the datas that makes it very hard, if possibile at all, create such animation. RFS has changed many times the methodology used to compute the value making impossibile a direct comparison between different years. After some tinkering, I figured out that one way to handle the problem was to elaborate all the data as a "relative" index, by taking not the numeric value provided by RFS but the position in the ranking of every country and assign the value of zero to the country with the best record and one hundred to the country with the worst. The values are then converted to a colormap where a pale yellow is equal to 0 and a dark red is equal to 100. Every year, the worst country in the index gets the darker red and the best the pale yellow. It is therefore very important to note that if a country gets a lighter color than the year before, this doesn’t necessary mean that the press is enjoying more freedom, but rather there are fewer countries than the year before where the condition were better. In a way I could say that while this map is not helpful to understand the press freedom trend, it can be use to understand which are the countries where the condition is the best (or worst) for a given year. Notwithstanding the methodology flaws, the two charts can be useful to draw some simple fact. As an example, it is clear that in the CEE Europe the Mediterranean countries (Spain, Italy, Greece) enjoy the worst press freedom of the union and they are "bested" in this rather unflattering ranking only from the new union members, that is eastern countries that had not known any press freedom for several decades after the second world war.