(Photo: Carolyn Kaster – AP)
A new report from Freedom House on political liberties around the world ranks the United States pretty high on the list, but if President Donald Trump continues on his present course, we are likely to see the country falling far behind the world’s freest countries next year.
According to the just-released “Freedom in the World 2017” report, which scores countries’ freedoms on a scale from 1 to 100 and ranks them as “free,” “partly free” or “not free,” the United States was a “free” nation in 2016, with an overall score of 89. It shared that category with Finland (100), Sweden (100), the United Kingdom (94) and about 80 other countries.
But the United States dropped from 37th place in the ranking last year to 48th this year.
“In 2016, populist and nationalist political forces made astonishing gains in democratic states,” the report said. It added that “Trump’s positions during 2016 raised fears of a foreign policy divorced from America’s traditional strategic commitments to democracy, human rights and the rules-based international order.”
When I asked the Freedom House report’s lead author, Arch Puddington, whether press freedoms were a major focus of the study, he said a separate Freedom House report focusing on press freedoms is due in May.
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Etiquetas: media, Trump
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