site.btaBulgaria Ranked 109th in World Press Freedom Index

Bulgaria Ranked 109th in World Press Freedom Index

Paris, April 26 (BTA) - Bulgaria is ranked 109th out of 180 countries in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index compiled by the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and unveiled on Wednesday. The country has climbed four notches up in the ranking compared with last year's index, in which it placed 113th.

Bulgaria's score this year is 35.01 on a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 being the best possible score and 100 the worst. The top-ranked country, Norway, has a score of 7.60, and the bottom-ranked nation, North Korea, has 84.98.

The section on Bulgaria in the RSF report is titled "Bribing the media." It says that the country is ranked lower in the World Press Freedom Index than any other European Union member. "This is due to an environment dominated by corruption and collusion between media, politicians, and oligarchs including Delyan Peevski," the report says. Peevski is a member of Parliament and owner of the New Bulgarian Media Group. "His group has six newspapers and controls nearly 80% of print media distribution. The government's allocation of EU funding to certain media outlets is conducted with a complete lack of transparency, in effect bribing editors to go easy on the government in their political reporting or refrain from covering certain problematic stories altogether."

In the World Press Freedom Index, the degree of freedom available to journalists is determined by pooling the responses of experts to a questionnaire devised by RSF. This qualitative analysis is combined with quantitative data on abuses and acts of violence against journalists during the period evaluated. The criteria evaluated in the questionnaire are pluralism, media independence, media environment and self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, and the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of news and information.