Measuring Media Accuracy

There is an organization that measures the quality of media across countries. It's called Reporters Without Borders.

This is important for macroeconomics as the politicians and bureaucrats in many countries lie about performance. And then they're pronouncements are often taken at face value due to Westphalian Sovereignty.

N.B. As always, when looking at a "ranking" of entities, keep in mind that someone determined how to to weight things together. And you might not agree with those weights. So some digging is probably not a bad idea.

I decided to post about this because they publish a "heat map" every year of press freedom. But it's a biased one.

You actually need to click through to their website to see it. Sorry about that, but some sites don't like their stuff copied and reposted.

The problem is with their shading. Their index goes from 0 to 100. Scores from 40 to 100 are divided into 4 groups of equal width. That's OK as long as you do it across the entire range. But they don't. So their darkest (poorly rated) countries should be divided into at least 2 more groups (and that wouldn't be even, which is another no-no).

Most of you are probably interested in how the U.S. rates. And this problematic shading puts the U.S. in the middle of 5 groups, instead of in the third highest out of seven. This has the effect of making the U.S. seem much closer to say, China, than it really is.

Having said all that, this information was reposted at Statista in an even worse format:

So what's wrong with this one? Note that 3 of the shades are variations on reddish, and are quite distinct from the yellowish-tan, and turquoise-ish of the other 2 shades. This serves to visually group those three more closely together.

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I would pay attention to their discussion of how the U.S. was rated. Most of their markdowns are pretty reasonable. Despite our first amendment, we probably should not be in the top groups.