Taiwan ranked 24th in this year’s World Press Freedom Index released by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) yesterday, climbing three places from last year, while press freedom declined in most other countries.
Taiwan was second in the Asia-Pacific region and first in East Asia.
Aleksandra Bielakowska, advocacy manager at RSF’s Asia-Pacific Bureau, said that Taiwan’s improvement was largely due to declines elsewhere, as the country’s global score, which was 77.04 this year, was nearly unchanged from a year earlier.
Photo: EPA-EFE
It was “quite significant” how public trust in the media had grown in Taiwan over the past five years, she said, citing the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, which showed the metric at 33 percent last year, up from 24 percent in 2020.
However, “government pressure” led English-language public broadcaster TaiwanPlus to remove a report referring to then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump as a “convicted felon” in November last year, Bielakowska said, adding that it was a “rare,” but “deplorable and very worrying” incident.
Public media have a mandate to serve the public and must be able to operate independently from the government, she said.
Public Television Service (PTS), to which TaiwanPlus is affiliated, at the time cited concerns over the TaiwanPlus report’s “objectivity” as the main reason for its removal.
Minister of Culture Li Yuan (李遠) later said that the controversy caused by the report was “very serious” and that his ministry had “informed” PTS of that.
Bielakowska also expressed concern over press freedom in Hong Kong, which dropped to 140th from 135th in the rankings, recording its lowest-ever global score of 39.86 this year.
“Basically, we see that it’s starting to be almost impossible [for Hong Kong journalists] to continue working” in an environment where they face ongoing government pressure and, in some cases, sedition charges for their reporting, she said.
The latest rankings showed that press freedom worldwide deteriorated over the past year to the “difficult” category — the second-lowest in the index’s five-tier system — for the first time since it was launched in 2002.
“More than six out of 10 countries, or 112 in total, saw their overall scores decline in the index,” the group said, attributing the deterioration to economic pressure media firms faced.
The situation largely stemmed from ownership concentration, pressure from advertisers and financial backers, and limited or nontransparent public funding, RSF said.
Norway topped the rankings again this year, followed by Estonia and the Netherlands, according to the index, which is based on surveys of journalists, researchers and human rights advocates worldwide.
At the other end of the list were China (178th), North Korea (179th) and Eritrea (180th and last).
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