Press Freedom

You might want to take a look at the Reporters Without Borders website, it has some decent articles about restrictions on press freedom and associated matters.

I was especially interested in the table here which shows their index of press freedom for the year to 1 September 2006 - I await the 2007 version with interest. The countries with the most press freedom are unsurprisingly overwhelmingly from the democratic west. The best 16 countries are all European and it is not until Benin in 23rd place that we see an African country. The much criticized Israel places 50th with a score of 12. You will not be surprised that the bottom 20 countries with massively high scores, are in one way or another, almost without exception, run by despots or anti-democratic governments and are that is also where you will find the less enlightened Muslim countries as well as Singapore (but that is a whole other story).