IN the absence of pub quizzes during these days of social distancing, here’s a question to ponder. In which current global table does Norway come out on top and North Korea find itself in bottom place? Most of us hazarding a guess at the answer would likely say it had something to do with human rights, and that assertion wouldn’t be far off the mark.

The answer is, in fact, the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, compiled by the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, better known by its French acronym RSF.

As someone who has spent the past four decades of his life working in journalism, every year I examine the data compiled in the index with a degree of trepidation. Its main purpose is to evaluate the situation for journalists in 180 countries and territories across the globe.

In this regard there’s no doubt the index has become an extremely useful advocacy tool in helping promote free, independent and pluralistic journalism and in defending media workers’ rights.

But vital as such a role is, this serves as little consolation to the fact that the conclusions drawn by the index these past few years have been far from heartening. The current index is no exception, or then again perhaps it is, for rarely in recent times has it portrayed a bleaker picture of the threats facing media freedom worldwide.

Those threats, of course, have inevitably been amplified by the coronavirus pandemic, as existing and aspiring autocrats around the world crack down on journalists’ ability to do their jobs at a time when transparency is more vital than ever.

In fact so pressing are those threats that RSF has warned that the next 10 years will pretty much determine the fate of journalism as we know it.

“We are entering a decisive decade for journalism linked to crises that affect its future,” says RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire.

“The coronavirus pandemic illustrates the negative factors threatening the right to reliable information, and is itself an exacerbating factor,” Deloire added in his recent summation of the current index ratings.

Questioning what all this means for freedom of information, pluralism and reliability by 2030, Deloire maintains the answer to that is already being determined and as we move through this “decisive decade”, five converging crises are having a malign influence and potentially devastating impact on international journalism.

The first of these is what RSF says is a “geopolitical crisis” due to aggressiveness of authoritarian regimes, which the coronavirus has already starkly highlighted.

The second is a “technological crisis”, resulting from the lack of appropriate regulation of digitalised communication, creating a kind of “information chaos” blurring the lines between fact, fiction, propaganda and advertising, often putting them in direct competition with mainstream bona fide journalism.

The third crisis in this perfect storm facing journalism highlighted by RSF is a growing physical hostility towards journalists globally.

Much of this hostility, it concludes, is an offshoot of the hatred towards the press fomented by some political leaders such as US President Donald Trump and his counterpart Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

“Hostility toward journalists and news outlets in the US deepened and intensified, and few attacks were as vitriolic as those that came from the president,” RSF concluded.

“The abuse is only getting worse amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, as journalists covering the Trump administration’s response to the crisis are subjected to the president’s attacks during his press briefings,” the media watchdog added.

According to the index ratings, the US now ranks 45th out of 180 countries. A “dangerous anti-press sentiment” as well as the arrest, physical assault, public denigration and harassment of journalists had trickled down to the local level in America, the report determined.

Related to this open hostility and another of the five elements in this crisis press freedom faces is one of trust, says RSF. Or put another way, the public suspects broadcast and print news to have been contaminated by unreliable information.

In making its case for this, the media watchdog cites a recent Edelman Trust Barometer conducted by the US-based public relations group that studies public trust in institutions.

According to those polled in Edelman’s latest international survey, 57% of people believed the media they used were contaminated with information they thought untrustworthy. That in itself most would admit is cause for serious concern, but combined with the other threats outlined, all five converge into one enormous challenge to the worldwide press of the future.

It’s a sobering thought, not least today as we mark World Press Freedom Day along with its theme this year of “journalism without fear or favour”.

In order to understand in real terms just what these threats mean to journalism’s future, it’s worth drilling down a little deeper into their implications.

The obvious place to start is with the impact of the pandemic itself. Having said that, long before the emergence of the coronavirus, world press freedoms were recognised as being in decline.

For many years journalists have weathered authoritarian regimes and threats to their safety. But where most observers are now in near total agreement is that the pandemic has brought a new dynamic to the media landscape exposing the long-term risks of suppressed press freedoms

As Robert Mahoney, deputy executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), points out, those countries that stifle independent news and jail journalists in “normal” times have already been hard at work.

In what some journalists have called the global “Covid crackdown”, China and Iran – 177th and 173rd respectively in the Press Freedom Index – tried to quarantine the truth. In Iran’s case the leadership there censored news of its spread with devastating consequences for public health.

MANY media monitoring groups are now concerned that for the most part, govern-ments have been getting away with their efforts to impede independent journalism without being called out by other countries, all of which are also preoccupied in dealing with the pandemic.

“Governments in Thailand, through Hungary and Egypt to Honduras are using the cloud cover of the disease to introduce emergency measures that could roll back basic freedoms, clamp down on the press or restrict foreign correspondents,” warned Mahoney recently on Al Jazeera.

At its worst this manifests itself in arrests, detention, intimidation, physical threats and sometimes murder.

In terms of Covid-19 related reporting, human rights group Amnesty International last week highlighted a handful of cases where reporters have been prosecuted or threatened. Among them was that of

Russian journalist Elena Milashina, whose newspaper Novaya Gazeta on April 12 published an article in which she criticised the Chechen authorities’ response to the pandemic.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov in turn posted an Instagram video in which he threatened Milashina, appealing to the Russian government and Federal Security Service (FSB) to “stop those non-humans who are writing and provoking our people”.

In Egypt, meanwhile, security forces arrested Atef Hasballah, the editor-in-chief of AlkararPress newspaper, on March 18 and subjected him to enforced disappearance for nearly a month, following a post on his Facebook page in which he challenging the official statistics on Covid-19 cases.

In Venezuela, journalist Darvinson Rojas spent 12 days in detention after reporting on the spread of the virus in the country and was pushed by authorities to reveal his sources.

These are only three of many instances globally where reporting on the pandemic brought journalists under threat, but it’s not only during the current crisis that such measures have been documented

Last year, 142 serious threats to press freedom were recorded, including 33 physical attacks on journalists. A total of 43 cases of intimidation and direct threat have been listed in a report compiled by several media organisations, among them RSF, the Association of European Journalists and the International Press Institute.

Late last year, too, 105 journalists were imprisoned for their work, primarily in Turkey, Russia and Azerbaijan.

As Otmar Lahodynsky, President of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ), wrote recently in the EU affairs newspaper New Europe, the takeover of media by oligarchs and governments in Hungary, Poland and Serbia were also noted and criticised in the report. “Many public service broadcasters have been turned into uncritical propaganda channels for the government. Abuses of media freedom are also increasing in Western Europe,” says Lahodynsky, adding that political influence on the media is increasing in many of the 47 countries that count themselves as members of the Council of Europe.

But beyond these obvious threats to journalism and its future lie others, many economic, with job cuts gutting newsrooms. As RSF makes clear, the digital transformation has brought the media to their knees in many countries.

Falling sales, the collapse in advertising revenue and the increase in production and distribution costs have in turn forced news organisations to restructure and lay off journalists.

“The economic crisis has also accentuated the phenomena of ownership concentration and, even more, conflicts of interest, which threaten journalistic pluralism and independence,” warns the watchdog.

The bottom line here is that global journalism currently faces both old threats and new, raising the inevitable question of how best to protect and nurture its existence in the “decisive decade” that lies ahead.

According to Farhana Haque Rahman, senior vice-president of the global news agency Inter Press Service, ultimately, just as in a pandemic, the freedom of the press can only be guaranteed by a co-ordinated global effort and a focus on highlighting the long-term advantages of a more critical world.

“This means pressure to reinforce legal frameworks, including prosecuting harassers and killers, perhaps just as the international community would persecute war criminals, while offering a global protection for journalists,” says Rahman.

“Finding and promoting innovative ways of subsidising independent media, as well as getting big tech companies to pay for the content they share, is also crucial to help a free press to thrive,” she says.

Just as the response to the coronavirus pandemic has been described as a marathon not a sprint, so must the long-term future of journalism be viewed in the same terms.

Ever since the United Nations proclaimed World Press Freedom Day on this date back in 1993, the obstacles facing independent reporting have consistently been immense.

Censorship, smear campaigns, harassment, intimidation, arrest and detention, threats of physical assault and murder are the challenges journalists across many parts of the world have had to contend with.

Right now these are unprecedented times, and, as one colleague recently observed, no working journalist alive has ever covered anything like this story of the pandemic. Even veterans of war reporting or Ebola coverage have had to re-evaluate risk and learn new skills. As we mark World Press Freedom Day, it’s obvious that many challenges beyond the current one lie in wait. Most likely these will put the very heart of journalistic practice and the ability to carry it out without fear or favour to an unprecedented test.

To say we need journalism now more than ever is true. But it also masks a reality worth reiterating, one that makes clear the importance of having a free press each and every day, whether the story is of global or local concern.

In either instance, holding power to account and performing a public interest role is fundamental to this.

But just as the press holds the powers that be to account, so too do we need reasoned critical consumers of the media, those similarly capable of holding the media to task for any misrepresentations of the truth.

It was the great French author and journalist Albert Camus who once observed that: “A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.”

If, as the World Press Freedom report suggests, the next 10 years prove to be an unprecedented test for the media, then good journalism will need all the allies it can muster.

As Deloire rightly pointed out: “For this decisive decade to not be a disastrous one, people of goodwill, whoever they are, must campaign for journalists to be able to fulfil their role as society’s trusted third parties, which means they must have the capacity to do so.”

Speaking as someone with a vested interest in that happening, I can only say how welcome that trust would be. But equally, however, those within my chosen profession must realise that in order for that to take place, we too must prove ourselves worthy of that same trust.