Falling Fast

The US dropped 9 places in the 2006 Index of Press Freedom by Reporters Without Borders issued last month...

One particularly egregious US case cited is the jailing of Josh Wolf, a freelance journalist and blogger, who has been imprisoned more than four months for refusing to hand over video tapes he filmed in San Francisco of a protest against the G8 Summit last year...

Other cases of US press intimidation include Sudanese cameraman Same al-Hajj, who works for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazzeera, who has been held without trial since June 2002 at the US military base at Guantanamo; and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who has been held by US authorities in Iraq since April. The AP has been trying to secure his release for seven months...

During the first year of the index, in 2002, the US was ranked 17th. The US has fallen...36 places since 2002.

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During Clinton's presidency, the Republican majority in Congress spent 140 hours hearing testimony over whether Clinton had misused the White House Christmas card list to seek out potential Democratic donors. By contrast, there have been only twelve hours of testimony so far on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Georg Mascolo in Washington