Greece’s conservative government New Democracy lashed again against Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Wednesday, branding them “unreliable” after the publication of a report ranking Greece the worst EU country when it comes to media freedom for a second consecutive year.
Government spokesman Akis Skertsos was quick to criticize the RSF report as an “apparent lack of elemental reliability in the evaluation criteria”.
“According to RSF, press freedom flourishes in military and authoritarian regimes or in countries torn by civil wars, such as Burkina Faso, which is ranked 58th in this year’s press freedom ranking, Guinea, which is at 85, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau at 74 and 78 respectively”, Skertsos said in a statement.
“On the contrary, according to the same organisation, the press ‘suffers’ in European democracies that have deep-rooted respect for the freedom and independence of journalists, such as Greece, which it ranks in 107th place!!!”, he added.
According to the 2023 World Press Freedom Index published on Wednesday, the situation of press freedom in Greece has deteriorated as the Mediterranean country ranked 107th out of 180 countries worldwide.
In 2022 when similarly displeased with the less-than-stellar ranking, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis described the rankings as “crap”, recalls euractiv.com.
On an EU level, Pavol Szalai, RSF Head of EU/Balkans Desk, told EURACTIV that the gap between Greece and the rest of the EU has widened (23 places away from the second to the last EU country – Malta, while in 2022, Greece was 17 places away – from Bulgaria).
PS Never mind the ND criticism. It was only two days before that Skertsos also questioned the methodology of OECD regarding its published income vs inflation.’ I can;t remeber right now if ND has also questioned the Eurostat data even though economic data are given to international institutions by the Greek statistics authority.
Meanwhile, in the scheduled televised debate between political party leaders, which will be moderated by 6 journalists: 1 journalist (Skai TV) is the wife of the Athens mayor, who is the PM’s nephew. 1 journalist is married to a former MP and government spokesman of New Democracy.
if we werent living here, we could laugh at this clown world.. as it is…