Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
On the 30th anniversary of the Windhoek Declaration this year, media outlets, civil society institutions and media activists will reflect on the state of press freedom and other systemic issues facing journalists, and the profession of journalism, around the world.
Each year, the publication of the World Press Freedom Index is meant to inform and hopefully inspire or shame governments into remedial action, but I doubt it makes it into Vladimir Putin’s daily briefings.
I read this year’s World Press Freedom Index list alongside the World Happiness Report to see how the top 10 compared with one another. Seven of the top 10 countries appeared on both lists (and yes, those overachieving Scandinavians are all there). I won’t dive into the perils of confusing correlation and causation and I am certainly not saying press freedom equates to a happy society. It’s more likely that when governments get things right, they have less reason to try to influence the media and they can tackle things such as inequality.