Freedom House says a right-wing newspaper hurts Israel's press freedom

Freedom House had been one of the remaining, objective arbiters of which countries are free and which aren't. A few years ago, I had shown that there was no correlation between how free a country is according to Freedom House and how much attention it received from Human Rights Watch.

Unfortunately, Freedom House seems to have fallen prey to the politically correct anti-Israel crowd.

Its new report on press freedom (embargoed until later this week) changes Israel's rating from "free" to "partly free." And the reasons it gave to justify this are, by any measure, bizarre.

Israel's score went to 32, which is barely in the "partly free" category. 

Freedom House ranks freedom of the press under three broad criteria: whether there is freedom under the legal, political or economic environment. The description of why Israel's score went down seems to be wholly based on their perception of the economic environment making it harder for print media to survive, because Israel Hayom is distributed for free (plus the "paid content" part which I don't understand.)

Freedom House in 2015 gave Israel a 30 - a slightly better score, and it gave its reasons here. But I fail  to see how those reasons have changed for the worse this year.

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