Each year at this time, Freedom House issues a report on the state of global media freedom. The overall findings for 2012 were bleak: Just 14 percent of the world's population lives in societies that enjoy vibrant coverage of public affairs, a legal environment that undergirds a free press, and freedom from intrusion by the government or other political forces.
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The countries profiled below are members of an ignoble club -- the 10 most serious violators of press freedom in the world. Most of these countries do have constitutions that pay tribute to the values of freedom of speech and information, but in reality, these protections are often superseded by laws that criminalize press commentary that, according to these regimes, insults the political leadership, breeds "hate," supports "terrorism," or threatens national security. The methods employed to enforce a regime of censorship vary from the downright thuggish to more nuanced tactics. The absence of outright violence does not necessarily signify that a country enjoys a freer media landscape than a country where journalists are regularly murdered. Decades of totalitarian control in North Korea and Cuba have rendered serious efforts at independent journalism nonexistent in the first case and rare in the second.
Many believe that the Internet and other forms of new media will be instruments of liberation for the oppressed. But most of the countries described still have relatively low Internet penetration rates, and in every case, policies have been put in place to limit new media's potential political impact. Whether these measures will prove effective as these countries move to further integrate in the global economy is open to serious question:
1. North Korea
From Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un, North Korea has retained the grimmest media environment in the world. The party-state owns the press in its entirety and devotes considerable energy and resources to the task of preventing North Koreans from hearing alternative interpretations of events. According to the constitution, news coverage should conform to the "collective spirit," an Orwellian phrase that in practice means building up the image of the leader as loved by his own people and feared by everyone else and condemning regime critics as "hyenas," " jackals," and other stock insults from an archaic totalitarian vocabulary that other dictatorships abandoned decades ago. Although the Associated Press has been allowed to set up a bureau in Pyongyang, foreign journalists are placed under the control of special minders, who seize their mobile phones on arrival, guard against chance meetings with ordinary people, and carefully monitor their movements.
While North Korea has kept Internet penetration low, the state has come to recognize new media's potential as yet another instrument of propaganda both at home and for a foreign audience. North Korea even maintains its own official YouTube and Twitter handles. Internet connections, however, are restricted to a handful of approved high-level officials and academics who have received state approval. For average citizens, web access is available only to a nationwide intranet -- the Kwangmyong -- that does not link to foreign sites.
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