so does that mean that bastions of freedom like Mali and Benin have more freedom of press than the US

You really do need to read a bit more carefully, Phil. Freedom of the press is totally wasted on you. Your numbers are from 2005, and last year’s Index. As Hesari says, Denmark is definitely NOT at the top of the list any more… RSF has not yet got around to pasting up their 2006 figures on their website, though that is no reason for you to put up numbers that completely contradict what is in the original article you link to. The US had dropped to 53rd, BTW.

Your numbers are from 2005, and last year’s Index.

Ah yes, I clicked on the wrong link on their website. Thanks for the info! I’ll make the changes.

Finland’s freedom of the press is a rather moot point, when one considers just how much a “country of concencus” Finland is, with its media being no exception to the rule. There are only subtle differences in the Finnish media’s foreign news reporting, and appauling conformity during the Mohamed cartoon crisis.

The Finnish media rarely if ever seeks out stark/contrasting opinions on foreign affair issues (on a regular basis), instead they rely on the “tired and worn out mantras of political correctness that the so called “experts” regurgitate to the public with familar regularity. It’s this kind of drivel that receives the “stamp of approval” from the Finnish social/political elite, that is given preferential treatment by the Finnish main stream media.

There is a lot of pressure for journalists to conform to the status quo, and to not rock the boat, just look at the arrogance of Vanhanen in his latest words over polticians’ private lives ect. According to Matti Vanhanen, just being a poltician should automatically shield a person from embarresing questions…

Is the Finnish press the most free? It depends on how it’s sliced.

Here we have yet another study where Finland outperforms. It is amazing how finnish newspapers are quick to publish these things. Amazing.

Press freedom in Finland… come on! Few months ago a finnish journalist got fired because he “dared” to publish a stupid things such as those danish cartoons on Mohammed and now they write there is free press…

No newspaper ever publish nothing really “hot”, apart the public list of which ministers did not pay the TV fee… That’s way there is never any action against any journalist. That would occur after the publication, but the self-censorship (= limited freedom) avoids that.

How does Phil think he can evaluate the state of the media in Finland if he can’t understand Finnish?

@6 it is not Phil who is doing the reanking, he is merely reporting it

@6. From the name you sound Finnish.
I am happy to see that there is at least somebody not brainwashed by finnish media.
This is how HS reports the news that Finland is the 3rd country in the world for consumption of resources of the world:

http://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/artikkeli/WWF+Suomalaisten+ymp%C3%A4rist%C3%B6rasitus+maailman+suurimpia/1135222531210
I hope to get this article on the international edition, and that they do not only report the “good” news…

You can find a chart with the scores of the nations from this italian web page (chart is in English)
http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Scienze_e_Tecnologie/2006/10_Ottobre/24/pop_risorse.shtml

Of course there is freedom of press. Here press publishes basically b…hit or what pleases the crowd to show that in Finland everything is nice. Look for example, at this article:
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/A+very+small+piece+of+news/1135222537401

This article refers to the fact that Vanhanen used English to talk with Swedish PM and not Swedish!!!!! Oh, so important to hear! I’ll sleep sound tonight…

@8 – regarding the consumption of resources that is truly incredible. (But let’s be fair in that is a per capita number, not total number) I bet this has to do with the fact that nearly all the food eaten here is imported.

#9 Rather than betting, Bill, wouldn’t it make more sense to go and read the details off the WWF page, where they are quite clearly displayed, provided that you are willing to read a lengthy and complex report rather than a quick tasty soundbite?

You will discover that Finland is placed very high in the listings for two perfectly obvious reasons – firstly the country is a massive user of energy, because it has extremely energy-intensive industries in the pulp and paper sector, and also requires considerable energy for heating owing to its rather adverse geographical position (read: it’s fucking cold here in the winter). Secondly, it scores extremely high on the use of timber for said pulp and paper industries. Were these two items to be removed from the equation or set at norm levels for countries with less heavy dependence on the production of cellulose and newsprint (two items that other countries USE – but which they are not penalised for in the “footprinting”), Finland would not stick its head above the parapet anything like as much.

Just to underpin this, the forestry use (timber, pulp, paper and fuelwood) figures for Finland are 2.2 and for Sweden they are 1.7, whereas in the UK for example they are less than 0.5. You can see a striking difference here, which is also reflected in the overall totals, which appear to be a simple adding-up of figures for basic parameters such as forestry use, fishing, Co2 emissions, etc, etc. Take out the high forestry use and elevated Co2, and you get a pretty ordinary-looking total. Simple, really.

It is also interesting that while Finland is undeniably a major consumer, the country’s ecological footprint is barely half of its total biocapacity. Again, the vast amount of forested land pushes this latter figure skywards. Finland scores a 12.0 rating in biocapacity (the highest in Europe and one of the highest in the world after such countries as Gabon, Bolivia, Australia, NZ, and Canada), compared with 9.6 for Sweden (another heavily forested country that also scores high on ecological footprint), and compared with just 4.7 for the United States, a country that stomps a 9.6 ecological footprint and therefore “takes out twice what it can put back in”, and has an ecological deficit of 4.8 or 4.9. Still, this is nothing besides the United Arab Emirates, who have a footprint of 11.9 and biocapacity of 0.8! Finland is in the fortunate position of only consuming around 60% of its biocapacity each year (7.6/12.0).

A further point not as yet mentioned in the very short pieces in the media is that water consumption has not been included in the footprint. Here Finland produces a very ordinary figure of 493, compared with several EU countries that use conspicuously more of this increasingly rare resource, and Canada and the United States, which use more than 1,500 of the equivalent units each.

I sincerely hope that any decent Finnish report on this subject deals with it properly and does not merely say: “Shock, horror, sackcloth and ashes, Finland ranks third in world in ecological footprint” – which would tell people nothing very much at all.

But, to return to the gambling motif, I bet that “nothing very much at all” is what most people would prefer to read, because they are too fucking lazy to do anything more. Which is probably why, with all the access to information tools they have these days, I think they probably deserve every short-changing bum deal the press serves up to them.

Now go read the report. It’s here. The tables you need are around page 37 of 44.

http://assets.panda.org/downloads/living_planet_report.pdf

http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=639

haha i love how they shove their ‘free speech’ in everyones face and look where they are on the list

the US is 53rd. it tied with those other great proponents of free
speech: botswana, croatia, tonga, and uruguay. i mean honestly, when i think of botswana, i think ‘FREE SPEECH’ all over.
mozambique also made it before the US. so did, mali, ghana, namibia,
lithuania, and bolivia.

israel, that democratic, free society in the midst of those bedouin
hijackers, is 135th. and i don’t know why the article says 135th,
because in the list it seems that israel is 50th too. probably all
because of ha’aretz.

and about the cartoons, free speech is not an invitation to print any and all garbage just because it results in sales. newspapers are not open forums for insults. you can state your beliefs without resorting to childish mockery.
the danish editor of the newspaper that published the cartoons did not allow cartoons of jesus to be printed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1703501,00.html

smell that?
that’s the funk of hypocrisy wafting from media everywhere

just saw this. not related but very important:

Joka viides turkulaisnuori uskoo rotujen älykkyyseroihin

http://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/artikkeli/Joka+viides+turkulaisnuori+uskoo+rotujen+%C3%A4lykkyyseroihin/1135222532101

translation for phil:

1 out of 5 youths from Turku believe in intelligence differences between races.

oh how i’m proud to be finnish

@Mikko, post 5,
the freedom of the press belongs to whoever owns the press, not to the hired hands. Rock the boat and you’re history. (Of course this happens rarely, because people with the balls to rock the boat hardly ever get in a position to do so.) Freedom of speech, OTOH, means you’re free to say what you want, but very few will hear you. Never confuse these two freedoms. Rupert Murdoch exercises the former, any loser can exercise the latter.

@13,

and what about the criminal investigation on the newspaper for publishing those pictures?

@14,
the only criminal investigation I’m aware of was of the Suomen Sisu webpage. They were suspected of disturbing ‘uskonrauha’, a concept I can’t grasp well enough to try translating it, but I guess it is a sort of multicultural replacement of the old laws against blasphemy and means you’re supposed to leave other peoples’ religious beliefs in peace. The prosecutor decided to drop charges which was the right thing to do, the last thing we need is to make martyrs out of ultranationalist kooks.
The guy in Oulu who lost his job wasn’t charged with anything, it’s just that when major advertisers threatened to stop bying ads in the paper, the paper fired him.

@15,

“the only criminal investigation I’m aware of was of the Suomen Sisu webpage. They were suspected of disturbing ‘uskonrauha’, … The prosecutor decided to drop charges which was the right thing to do, ”

Obviously it was the right thing to do. The simple fact of starting an investigation for this kind of things was a shame for a democratic country.

“The guy in Oulu who lost his job wasn’t charged with anything, it’s just that when major advertisers threatened to stop bying ads in the paper, the paper fired him.”

I found this news in the web:

http://newsroom.finland.fi/stt/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=11874&group=General

“The board of Finnish culture magazine Kaltio decided Friday to sack its editor, Jussi Vilkuna, after he refused to remove a cartoon featuring a masked prophet Muhammad from the magazine’s website.”

To me it looks a very bad thing. He was not charged, but the fact that he has been fired after 8 years of good service is an indication of the “self-censorship” newpapers apply in order to avoid troubles.

In every state in Europe, there has been at least one newspaper who published the pictures. It did not happen in Finland. I did not like it and I think it is because there is some kind of “pressure” on newspapers to not really “push anybody’s buttons”.

@16,
I don’t know, but I’ve always assumed that if my superiors order me to do something that is part of my job and I refuse, I can get sacked. Not that the Kaltio board wasn’t acting like total cowards.

@16, It is the journalist who must do what the editor says. The editor is the one who decides the line of the newspaper.

If that guy were a journalist I could agree with you. But he was the editor.

If the editor is controlled, the newspaper is not free to write.

I would put very little stock on any survey Reporters Without Borders publishes, as that organization is know for its anti-American stance.

@19 – perhaps, whilst digging into their ample amounts of information, they MAY have stumbled upon something that would warrant such anti-americanism? or should we dismiss them right away because there is nothing wrong with america?

and also, i find it funny that no one gives a damn that the editor of the danish newspaper wouldn’t publish a set of cartoons on jesus but he found no moral qualms about publishing cartoons on muhammad.
don’t any of you have any sense of irony??
the man refused to print jesus cartoons because it would incite violence and perhaps threats, but hey, muhammad should be free to mock, no?

freedom of speech or no freedom of speech, you can waste your breath arguing that all you want. the fact is, he censored himself when it came to christianity, then he should have done the same with islam. if he had printed jesus cartoons, then fine, let him print what he wants, it’s his damn newspaper.

@20.
to be fair, if he had published the Jesus cartoons, would the Christians have reacted with the same fury? Of course, there is a nasty tradition of selective blasphemy, insulting the religion of enemies and minorities (google ‘Judensau’ and you should find some images of the way Judaism has often been represented by Christians). But e.g. Salman Rushdie was not an outsider slandering Islam, and he got death threats, too.

@21,

you make good points, and i do not argue against them. and i do not need to research into christian representations of judaism, because that, surely, is one of the greatest shames in european history.
there is more than enough evidence to put us to shamme regarding that. but my point is, are we going to make the same damn mistake with muslims?
my argument is about the danish reporters using freedom of speech to defend themselves. in my mind, the editor of jyllands-posten threw away his right to hide behind freedom of speech the second he censored himself, so this argument cannot be used by him. it is outright hypocrisy. he says, hey, i can print what i want, denmark is a free land and i will not be coerced into censoring myself. fine. BUT YOU DID CENSOR YOURSELF YOU SILLY MAN.
the man is a white christian, refusing to make fun of his own religion and culture, but is more than happy to make fun of others. to me, that marks him out as a bigot. and worse, a bigot who doesn’t even know it.