Just in the week where three communications professionals were injured in a demonstration that took place last Sunday in the Meiggs neighborhood, in Central Station, on the occasion of the commemoration of Labor Day, with one of the injured in critical condition, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) delivered the 2022 list of its World Press Freedom Classification, placing Chile in 82nd place, dropping 28 places.
This decline of the country from place 54 out of 180, places Chile in a “Problematic” situation, and very close to becoming “Difficult”.
The World Press Freedom Classification, which evaluates the conditions in which journalism is practiced in 180 countries and territories around the world, highlights, in its 2022 edition, the disastrous effects of information chaos, created by a digital space globalized and unregulated, which favors false information and propaganda.
“At the international level, the asymmetry that exists between, on the one hand, open societies and, on the other, despotic regimes that control their media and their platforms, while waging propaganda wars, weakens democracies. At both levels, this double polarization is a factor of intensification of tensions”, they point out.
Chile is above countries like Ukraine (106) and Russia (155), both involved in a war.
“Among the most repressive autocratic regimes, China (175th) has used its legislative arsenal to confine its population and isolate it from the rest of the world, especially Hong Kong.
(148°), which has plummeted in the Classification. The logic of bloc confrontation is reinforced, as is the case between India (150th) of the nationalist Narendra Modi and Pakistan (157th). In the Middle East, insufficient press freedom continues to plague the conflict between Israel (86th), Palestine (170th) and Arab countries.”
Finally, they confirm that this 2022 there is a record number of countries in a “very serious” situation: Belarus (153rd) and Russia (155th). Among the most repressive countries for the press, Burma (176th) – where the February 2021 coup d’état has brutally set back the situation of journalists by ten years – rubs shoulders with North Korea (180th), Eritrea (179 °), Iran (178th), Turkmenistan (177th) and China (175th).
