The worst thing that it is an unbiased rating. French press is not that forgiving for their dear leader.
Well the French are not blessed with the chosen one.
The method for evaluating the JWB World Press Freedom Index relies upon a questionnaire distributed to journalists. http://rsf.org/index/qEN.html
Many of the questions are pretty subjective. A journalist in country with reasonably good press freedom is thus able to score his country as worse than a journalist in a country with pretty bad press freedom.
Otherwise, how did Canada (#18), which has pretty much the same press freedom as US except for a “Queen Censor” at the “Human Rights” Commission, score higher than US?
Well, JWB is pretty explicit that the treatment of Snowden and Manning enter into the ranking. Personally, I think Snowden is likely a hero and Manning is a mentally disturbed ex-soldier, but neither their treatment nor their revelations have much at all to do with press freedom per se. To other aspects of liberty, their revelations are profound; but press freedom, not much.
Still, slipping to #46, which drops the US out of the free countries into the mostly free countries, is disturbing. I don’t think it’s that bad, but the trend is awful. Especially since the same trend applies in the more objective indices of economic freedom published by Fraser Institute and Heritage Foundation, which also place the US in the “mostly free” category. However, we’re still #1 in prison population and incarceration rates, so there’s that.
For 2011, US-based Freedom House ranked the US #17 in Press Freedom. http://www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FOTP%202011%20Final%20Full%20Report.pdf
I think its methodology is better than the France-based Journalists Without Borders. However, Freedom House gets about 65% of its funding from the US government.
Objective consideration of its recent spying on journalists and whistleblowers argues that future rankings should drop. And, if there is any truth at all in the conspiracy theories about Breitbart and the Rolling Stone guy, well ... no matter what, North Korea will still be at the bottom of the list.