‘Highly Flawed’: US Academic Babones Questions Press Freedom Surveys

US Academic Salvatore Babones questions research institutes over press freedom rankings

US academic Salvatore Babones questioned on Tuesday the Western surveys which pass verdicts on press freedoms of countries, describing one such 2024 study that rated India poorly as “travesty”.

Speaking at CNN-News18’s Rising Bharat Summit, he wondered who the respondents in such surveys were — and if mainstream journalists from India were quizzed, while referring to the V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2024, which termed India as “one of the worst autocratizers”.

“India, with 18% of the world’s population, accounts for about half of the population living in autocratizing countries,” the report by the institute that tracks democratic freedoms worldwide, released earlier this month, said.

Even though Babones said the V-Dem Institute was a highly reputed European research institution based at Sweden’s Gothenburg University, he cast doubt on their methodology.

He said that the evaluation of press freedom in India is often done by political scientists and ‘radical, Marxist’ website journalists and is not based on direct surveys that include journalists working in mainstream print, television and digital media.

“They have a highly flawed statistical methodology for measuring democracy. They have five chief indicators. Two of them are ‘Does a country have elections’ and ‘Is everybody allowed to vote’. (And these) are evaluated on a purely pro forma basis, meaning that, for example, Vietnam gets a perfect score for its elections, despite the fact that it only has one political party that’s allowed,” Babones said.

“V-Dem has recently rated India 110 in the world, which I think is a travesty. But it’s not V-Dem doing the rating. Most of the differentiation in V-Dem is based on their survey results. They survey mostly political scientists, mostly in the country being studied. So, primarily Indian political scientists being a V-Dem to evaluate India on a series of subjective indicators,” he further added.

Babones also said that it was shocking to see that India was ranked 20 positions lower than Hong Kong in press freedom rankings despite a crackdown on Hong Kong media which was once independent but many outlets are being forced to shut down for falling foul of new national security laws.

“The most egregious – Hong Kong is placed 20 ranks above India for press freedom. Hong Kong, where, of course, the Chinese Communist Party, has outlawed all opposition press,” Babones said.

Babones said that some media institutions have represented the interest of their members and their ‘constituency’ consists of mostly ‘radical Marxist journalists’.

‘They’re the people who answer the survey. It’s India’s journalists who are rating India low. It’s not the head office that’s rating India low,” Babones said.