In regards to my country report, I chose to do my research on the media in Belgium. As we learned in class, the U.S. is ranked No. 48 in terms of press freedom; however, Belgium is ranked No. 5. Prior to learning about how lowly-ranked our country was, I had assumed that the U.S. would be closer to the top of the list on Reporters Without Borders’ index of press freedom across the globe. I was curious to find out what censorship barriers existed in the American press, which is why I chose a country that had one of the freest press systems.
Media outlets in Belgium are not controlled by the government; nor do they have an organization that is equivalent to the U.S. government’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that censors certain information that is broadcast. While the U.S. and Belgium maintain that they have strong press freedom, the U.S. lags behind in terms of self-censorship. In researching media in Belgium, I found that journalists do not censor themselves when printing a pro-oppositional piece against the government. In the U.S., many newspaper journalists censor their opinions on political agendas (i.e. the War in Iraq) as well as defamation of politicians. This skewing of information has most likely led to Reporters Without Borders’ U.S. ranking of No. 48 in terms of press freedom.
Recently, foreign journalists have been the ones who have been threatened or endangered by the Belgian government. Within the last few years, there were a couple of incidences in which foreign journalists were arrested for covering certain events in Belgium. These circumstances, however, were influenced by the government. In September 2006, three Moroccan journalists were banned from a political conference. Furthermore, “a Mongolian journalist and her son were jailed in a holding center for foreigners without papers after they fled Mongolia following a number of attacks resulting from a series of articles she had written outlining corruption within the Mongolia government.” The blatant crack-down on foreign journalists in Belgium, however, has not severely impacted the ways in which Belgian journalist continue to gather their information. Belgian journalists and bloggers have continued to voice their opinions. Throughout my research, I have found relatively no evidence claiming that Belgian journalists are exercising self-censorship in term of news coverage. In America, however, news stories go through a filtering process similar to self-censorship.
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