Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has launched its 2022 annual Press Freedom Index, which assesses the state of journalism in 180 countries.

This year's report specifically highlights the catastrophic consequences of news and information chaos in an unregulated global online information space that is rife with fake news and propaganda..

The authors of the report state: information chaos has led to a double polarization in the world - at the level of polarization of the media, inciting disagreements within countries, as well as polarization between countries at the international level.

Internationally, democracies are weakened by the asymmetry between open societies and despotic regimes that control their media and online platforms while waging propaganda wars against democracies..

The Russian invasion (155th in the Index) of Ukraine (106th) at the end of February reflects this process, as the outbreak of the war was preceded by a Russian propaganda war, the paper notes..

China (175th), one of the most repressive autocratic regimes in the world, uses its legislative arsenal to isolate the population from receiving independent information and cut them off from the rest of the world, especially from the population of Hong Kong (148th).

Lack of freedom of the press in the Middle East continues to affect the conflict between Israel (86th), the Palestinian Authority (170th) and other Arab states.

Speaking about Russia and the war it unleashed in Ukraine, Reporters Without Borders highlights factors such as “killed and injured journalists in the field, a level of censorship not seen since Soviet times, and massive disinformation”.

RSF talks about 5 journalists killed in Ukraine since the beginning of the war. The report notes that “in Russia itself, the government has taken full control of news and information, imposing extensive censorship for the duration of the war, blocking the media and persecuting unruly journalists, forcing many of them to leave the country.. It started in 2021, after a tightening of the media law, when some of them are qualified as “foreign agents”, and prosecutions related to coverage of the fate of the now imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny”.

According to Reporters Without Borders, this information control is not limited to Russia.. “The Kremlin is imposing its vision of war on some of its neighbors, especially Belarus (153rd), where independent journalists continue to be harassed for their work … and where more than 20 media workers languish in prison. Alexander Lukashenko did not hesitate to send a plane on May 23, 2021 to arrest an opposition journalist who went into exile. An increasing number of media outlets are labeled as “extremist” and reading and sharing their content on social media is subject to criminal prosecution.”.

The RSF report also documents Russian pressure on the Central Asian governments on the media to ensure they cover the conflict in a more " In Turkmenistan (177th), the media - all controlled by the government - ignore the war in Ukraine.

The freest press in the world in 2022 is in the Scandinavian countries - Norway (1st), Denmark (2nd) and Sweden (3rd). In the top ten, unexpectedly, there were 2 countries that were part of the former USSR - Estonia (4th place) and Lithuania (9th place).

At the same time, the traditional leader in the field of press freedom, the European Union, despite good performance in a number of countries, faced negative trends.. The report notes " In Germany (16th), France (26th), Italy (58th) and the Netherlands (28th), journalists were physically assaulted; in addition, journalists have faced insults and threats of all kinds across the continent.

Governments in Slovenia (54th), Poland (66th), Hungary (85th), Albania (103rd) and Greece (108th) have tightened laws against journalists, according to RSF.

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