Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 47th on their 2011-2012 Press Freedom Index, down 27 places from the previous year, tied with Argentina and Romania.

“In the space of two months in the United States, more than 25 [journalists] were subjected to arrests and beatings at the hands of police who were quick to issue indictments for inappropriate behaviour, public nuisance or even lack of accreditation,” Reporters Without Borders wrote in their report. The US “owed its fall” to arrests and harassment related to coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the non-profit reporters’ rights group said.

The drop saw the US ranked just above Latvia, and Trinidad and Tobago, which fell 20 places due to a scandal involving the government spying on journalists.

In a statement released along with the index today, Reporters Without Borders noted that “Many media [around the world] paid dearly for their coverage of democratic aspirations or opposition movements…. Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011.”

In North African and Middle East, the Arab uprisings greatly affected the rankings of several nations. In Tunisia and Libya rose in the index as censorious regimes were deposed. Egypt, however, fell 39 places in the index due in part to “The hounding of foreign journalists for three days at the start of February, the interrogations, arrests and convictions of journalists and bloggers by military courts, and the searches without warrants,” the report said.

Syria and Yemen were already lowly ranked, so their crackdowns on demonstrations and journalists only caused them to sink a bit lower. Iran fell in the rankings to 175. China, “which has more journalists, bloggers and cyber-dissidents in prison than any other country,” the report notes, also ranked near the bottom of the index at 174.

Eritrea was the worst nation in the ranking for a fifth straight year, and its Horn of Africa neighbors Somalia and Sudan also received low rankings as part of an East African region where journalists are regularly subjected to violence, censorship and lengthy prison sentences served in awful conditions.

The Press Freedom Index is calculated using a scoring system based on a questionnaire distributed to partner organizations, a network of 150 correspondents around the world, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists.

For the full report and more on the creation of the index, see the full Reporters Without Borders release.

Related: New York Times Photographer Blocked by NYPD
Photogs Arrested in Raid on Occupy Protest at Zuccotti Park

In Eastman Kodak Company’s most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, dated January 3, 2012, the publicly traded company reported receiving notice from the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) warning that its stock was in danger of being delisted “because the average closing price of Kodak common shares was less than $1.00 over a consecutive 30-trading-day period.”

The one-time film giant has struggled to re-build its business as photography moves to digital imaging.

According to a report today on the Wall Street Journal Web site, Eastman Kodak Co. may file for bankruptcy if “in the coming weeks efforts to sell a trove of digital patents fall through.”

WSJ.com cited unnamed sources and noted that a spokesman for Kodak refused to comment on “market rumor or speculation.”

Kodak has six months to bring its minimum share price back above a dollar. In a press release (see the full Kodak press release below) about the NYSE notice, Kodak outlined factors that could prevent it from regaining share price compliance within a six-month period.

If Kodak does file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and its proposal is accepted by a judge and its creditors, Chapter 11 bankruptcy would allow it to reorganize its finances and restructure its debts without liquidating its assets.

Filing for Chapter 11 would not result in Eastman Kodak Company common stock remaining listed on the NYSE. The company would have to be restructured and relisted. (more…)

Over on PDNOnline we’ve gathered together the biggest photography news stories of 2011, a year marked infringements on the rights of photographers, by sticky legal cases whose results will be felt long into the future, and by tragedy. The 15 stories we highlighted were the most-read news articles and blog posts on PDNOnline and PDN Pulse this year.

Which of these stories do you think was the most important news story of the year? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

POYi has put out a call for entries for its 69th annual photojournalism competition. Online registration and entry will be open through January 12, 2012, contest organizers say.

POYi has added a new Sports Division, which will include new categories for Sports Photographer of the Year, as well as categories for Sports Multimedia and Sports Editing.

This year’s competition will include two special categories to recognize the work of photographers who documented the Arab Uprisings and the Japan Earthquake.

The Missouri School of Journalism will host the judging in a public forum from February 8 to February 28.

For more information about POYi and details about the competitions see http://poyi.org/.

A man arrested while photographing the police raid to shut down the Occupy L.A. encampment last Wednesday was finally released on $10,000 bail late Friday, according to press reports. Tyson Heder was charged with assault and battery on a police office and resisting arrest.

Heder, who has worked in Hollywood as a film editor and shoots concert videos for rock bands, was among a number of freelancers at the scene of the Occupy raid working without press credentials. The Los Angeles police issued a limited number of credentials, and warned those without credentials they would be subject to arrest.

This video released by CBS shows Heder angrily confronting police officers after one of them pushed him backwards down a set of stairs. “What’s your name?” he demanded several times of the officer who pushed him, before at least two officers tackled him. Several others piled on, and it took them more than two minutes to handcuff him and haul him away.

It isn’t clear from the footage what is happening in the middle of the scrum during Heder’s arrest. At one point, Heder can be heard saying, “You are beating me.” A police officer at the scene says, “Stop resisting the officers.” Heder can also be heard saying “I’m not doing anything” several times.

After his release on bail, Heder uploaded a self-portrait on Facebook showing a black eye. He said “I look like hell and my body hurts pretty much from head to toe.”

Heder thanked his family and friends for bailing him out, and said, “I look forward to proving the charges against me to be completely and thoroughly fraudulent.”

(Watch the video, and tell us what you think of the actions of both Heder and the police officers.)

Two photographers were among several journalists arrested in the vicinity of Zuccotti Park, where New York police cleared out Occupy Wall Street protesters early yesterday morning.

Other journalists reported they were roughed up by police and kept at a distance, while TV news helicopters were prevented from covering the police raid on the park from the air.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a press conference on Tuesday morning that journalists were being prevented from covering the raid “to protect members of the press,” according to a Huffington Post report.

But because journalists were not asking for protection, and were not being attacked by the protesters, many viewed the police action against them as a forced media blackout, intended to prevent coverage that might cast the police in a bad light or generate sympathy for the protesters.

The photographers arrested yesterday included Associated Press photographer Seth Wenig and Paul Lomax of DNAInfo.com, a local news site for Manhattan. Both were arrested shortly after noon near Duarte Square, where some Occupy Wall Street protesters had gathered after the police raid on Zuccotti Park, according to a report from The Guardian newspaper.

DNAInfo reported that Lomax was released after about four hours, and all charges against him were dropped

Police raided Zuccotti Park before dawn on Tuesday, forcing protesters out of the encampment they have occupied for nearly two months. Police then cleared the park of tents, personal effects, and debris. Police said they arrested about 140 protesters in the park while they were clearing it out, and another 50 or 60 people nearby.

Yesterday afternoon, protesters won a court order that allows them to continue their protest in Zuccotti Park, but they will no longer be allowed to set up tents or lie down in the park.

Yesterday we posted a story suggesting that the police are under pressure to respect constitutional rights, now that so many people are photographing their activities (especially at protests.)

But along comes this video of an Oakland policeman shooting the photographer for no obvious reason. The photographer, identified by the San Jose Mercury News as Oakland resident Scott Campbell, was filming the line of riot police last Thursday from a distance of about 50 feet. The police had moved in after Occupy Oakland protesters had defaced a nearby building, but the scene photographed by Campbell appears mostly calm.

As Campbell walked parallel to the line of police, the camera’s audio recorder picks up his voice asking, “Is this OK?” After about 30 seconds, one of the police fires a non-lethal projectile at Campbell, hitting him. As he falls, he cries out in pain and then says, “He shot me!” before the video cuts off.

The video, posted on YouTube and the tech site boingboing.net, prompted a news report in today’s San Jose Mercury News.

Campbell explained to the San Jose Mercury News that he asked “Is this OK?” because police had told him he was too close, so he had stepped back five or 10 feet. After he stepped back, he started filming.

Campbell was struck in the upper right thigh by the projectile. He told the San Jose Mercury News, “Since then what I’m really wondering is what was going through that person’ s head that made him think it was OK to shoot another person with a less-than-lethal weapon for doing absolutely nothing wrong.”

The newspaper quotes a criminal justice expert saying, “Unless there’s a threat that you can’t see in the video, that just looks like absolute punishment, which is the worst type of excessive force.”

The Mercury News said police and city officials did not respond immediately to emails seeking comment.

Related story: Pictures of Photog’s Arrest Force Police Accountability

© Le Monde/photos © Karim Ben Khelifa

As a kid growing up in Belgium, photographer Karim Ben Khelifa spent all his school vacations in Tunisia, visiting his aunts, uncles and cousins, enjoying family gatherings in his grandparents’ home, going to the beach. But in the last 20 years, he had been unable to return. Family members in Tunisia warned him that his work covering Islamic insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan would make him the target of the government of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, described as a “predator of press freedom” by Reporters without Borders. Because Ben Khelifa, 39, holds a Tunisian as well as a Belgian passport, the government of Tunisia could jail him with impunity.

After the ouster of Ben Ali in January inspired demonstrations across the Middle East, Ben Khelifa says,  “I managed to go to Yemen and Libya on assignment for Newsweek, Le Monde and Stern,” he says, but his dream was to return to Tunisia. “This is my country. It’s the one I want to work in more than any other.” In September, at the Visa Pour L’Image festival in Perpignan, he convinced editors at Le Monde to send him to Tunisia during the run-up to the country’s elections on October 23.  But he asked for a deal:  “If you send me back, I don’t want to cover any news. The work is about me going back to my roots after 20 years. They decided to take a different angle on the story.”

© Le Monde/photos © Karim Ben Khelifa

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US-based private equity firm The Blackstone Group has reached an agreement to buy 44 percent of Leica Camera AG in a deal to be completed by the end of the year, Blackstone and ACM Projektentwicklung GmbH, Leica’s parent company, announced today.

Blackrock investment funds will acquire the stake through a holding company, the announcement said.

In a statement, Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, the chairman of Leica’s supervisory board, called Blackstone “an experienced and internationally established strategic partner.” The deal, which is likely to be completed by the end of the year pending approval from government regulators, will help fund Leica’s “growth plans into new markets such as Asia, South America and the Middle East,” he added. Leica is coming off a 2010/2011 fiscal year when they turned record profits, the company reports.

Axel Herberg, Blackstone senior managing director, also emphasized a focus on emerging markets in his statement. “We are very excited about supporting Leica to secure long-term commercial relationships, specifically in emerging markets, and help strengthen the company¹s operational and retailing capabilities globally,” he said.

Jessica Dimmock and Antonin Kratochvil, photojournalists with the VII Photo Agency, created the video “Double Standard” as part of Starved for Attention, the multimedia campaign about malnutrition created by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The video highlights the disparity between the US government’s approach to preventing malnutrition at home and the food aid it ships to developing countries.

Dimmock interviewed mothers in Johnstown, PA, who use Women and Infant Children (WIC) vouchers– not without difficulties– to purchase nutritious food for their growing children. In Uganda,  Kratochvil interviewed a doctor who has treated infants dying of diarrhea, pneumonia and other diseases resulting from malnutrition. She talks about the nutritional deficiencies of the corn-and-soy cereal that the US ships –at great cost– as part of its humanitarian food aid. Kratochvil also shows in expressive black-and-white photos the corn farms in the American heartland where the cereal product originates.

“Double Standard” is one of several videos being shown in a new public exhibition that Doctors Without Borders is staging in four US cities. Visitors can tour an MSF field hospital and get information about an MSF petition which urges donor nations to ensure their food aid meets certain nutritional standards. The videos can also be viewed on the Starved for Attention web site and here.

Related story:
Interactive Photo Display on Malnutrition: Coming to a City Near You