Authoritarian governments are successfully able to suppress domestic media in the face of a fractured and ineffective campaign by the international community to combat the denial of press freedom abroad, according to the 2008 Press Freedom Index.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), in their annual report released yesterday, signaled growing corruption within democracies in conjunction with ineffective patterns of dialogue and an increasingly irrelevant United Nations as leading causes for the international community's inability to reign in the world's worst violators of press freedom.

"Destabilised and on the defensive, the leading democracies are gradually eroding the space for freedoms," says RSF. "The economically most powerful dictatorships arrogantly proclaim their authoritarianism, exploiting the international community's divisions."

The reports authors maintain that the current disjointed response by democratic countries has proven insufficient to pressure the leaders of closed societies to rescind diktats suppressing press freedom.

"The world's closed countries, governed by the worst press freedom predators, continue to muzzle their media at will, with complete impunity, while organisations such as the UN lose all authority over their members," argues RSF.

For 2008, Burma ranks 170th out of the 173 countries in the study, placing it just behind China, Vietnam and Cuba in the rankings and just ahead of bottom feeders Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea.

RSF describes Burma as a country "run by a xenophobic and inflexible junta" in which "journalists and intellectuals, even foreign ones, have for years been viewed as enemies by the regime, and they pay the price."

During the period of the study, from September 2007 to September 2008, numerous journalists were detained by Burma's military regime, notes the report.

Similar to prevalent analyses to date of the impact of the U.N.'s attempts to kick-start a substantive dialogue between Burma's ruling generals and opposition parties, RSF proceeds to conclude: "[D]ialogue has clearly had little success and even the most authoritarian governments are still able to ignore remonstrations without risking any repercussions other than the inconsequential displeasure of the occasional diplomat."

A wider look at the table also reveals that Burma is situated in a region of the world in which press freedom is not typically honored.

Including every neighbor of Burma and all members of ASEAN (with the exclusion of Brunei due to its not being ranked), the country earning the highest score from RSF for press freedom is Indonesia, occupying the 111th slot in the table. Indonesia, further, is the only member of the above to avoid the bottom 33 percentile of all countries with respect to press freedom.

This year's top honors go to the European triumvirate of Iceland, Luxembourg and Norway. In last year's report, Burma placed 164th out of 169 countries surveyed.