IFEX has announced that news media in Kyrgyzstan enjoy more freedoms comparing to their colleagues in other Central Asian countries.

The question is, though, whether we have many reasons to rejoice this fact. Every time the data on the status of mass media celebrating freedom of speech of certain countries is published I get perplexed and start asking myself on what basis all comparisons have been made and how valid they are in terms of assessing real things.

It’s interesting that the current report highlights increasing pressure on Kyrgyz journalists along with emphasizing various “freedoms” exercised by journalists in the country.

It’s always useful to specify certain criteria for comparison in such cases.
It’s not a revelation for us, for instance, that the situation with mass media in Uzbekistan seems to the worst one for years. Every time my colleagues from Tashkent come to Kyrgyzstan and get the chance to read our newspapers their faces get transformed immediately. “How can you write such horrible things about the president”,- they would exclaim, looking at me as if I committed the worst crime ever. Yes, comparing to Uzbek journalists we are free. Sometimes we are able to talk trash about our politics. But only in certain cases and one should be aware of that.

The same report claims that the number of journalists sued in Kazakhstan is enormous and that bureaucracy hampers journalistic activities in Tajikistan. If someone is going to say that it’s not the case for KG, I can claim, that this person knows nothing about “the delights” of being a journalist in Kyrgyzstan.

The point is that when you compare the bad and the worse, the bad always looks better. But it is not transformed into the good anyway.