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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freedom House | 2/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:31:05.082966+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Organization == Freedom House is a nonprofit organization with approximately 300 staff members worldwide. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has field offices in about a dozen countries, including Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia, Jordan, Mexico, and also countries in Central Asia. Freedom House states that its board of trustees is composed of "business and labor leaders, former senior government officials, scholars, writers, and journalists". All board members are current residents of the United States. Past members of the organization's board of directors include Kenneth Adelman, Farooq Kathwari, Azar Nafisi, Mark Palmer, P. J. O'Rourke and Lawrence Lessig, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Samuel Huntington, Mara Liasson, Otto Reich, Donald Rumsfeld, Whitney North Seymour, Paul Wolfowitz, Steve Forbes and Bayard Rustin.
=== Funding === According to their 2022 financial statement and independent auditors' report, Freedom House reported $93,705,255 of total revenue:
Federal grants – $79,606,961 International public agencies – $1,055,339 ($3,826,812 with donor restrictions) Corporations and foundations – $1,873,651 ($5,849,073 with donor restrictions) Individual contributions – $1,487,190 Net assets released from restrictions – $2,901,964 Freedom House's total expenses in 2022 were $85,530,680.
== Reports ==
=== Freedom in the World ===
Since 1973, Freedom House publishes an annual report, Freedom in the World, which it seeks to assess the current state of civil liberties and political rights in 195 countries and 15 territories. Freedom House's methods (around 1990) and other democracy-researchers were mentioned as examples of an expert-based evaluation by sociologist Kenneth A. Bollen, who is also an applied statistician. Bollen writes that expert-based evaluations are prone to statistical bias of an unknown direction, that is, not known either to agree with U.S. policy or to disagree with U.S. policy: "Regardless of the direction of distortions, it is highly likely that every set of indicators formed by a single author or organization contains systematic measurement error. The origin of this measure lies in the common methodology of forming measures. Selectivity of information and various traits of the judges fuse into a distinct form of bias that is likely to characterize all indicators from a common publication."
=== Freedom of the Press ===
The Freedom of the Press index was an annual survey of media independence, published between 1980 and 2017. It assessed the degree of print, broadcast, and internet freedom throughout the world, classifying nation-states as "free", "partly-free", and "not-free" as a result. An independent review of press freedom studies, commissioned by the Knight Foundation in 2006, found that FOP was the best in its class of Press Freedom Indicators.
=== Freedom on the Net === The Freedom on the Net reports provide analytical reports and numerical ratings regarding the state of Internet freedom for countries worldwide. Freedom on the Net's report covers a range of concepts that the other datasets do not, such as new legislation passed, but lacks the country coverage of other datasets. Expert surveys on the internet by the likes of Freedom House and V-Dem have been found to be more prone to false positives, while the remote sensing research by Access Now and the OpenNet Initiative are more likely to be prone to false negatives. The Millennium Challenge Corporation used the Key Internet Controls portion of the Freedom on the Net report to inform its country selection process until 2020 when this report was replaced with data on internet shutdowns from Access Now.
== Criticism ==
=== Relationship with the U.S. government === In 2006, the Financial Times reported that Freedom House had received funding by the State Department for "clandestine activities" inside Iran. According to the Financial Times, "Some academics, activists and those involved in the growing US business of spreading freedom and democracy are alarmed that such semi-covert activities risk damaging the public and transparent work of other organisations, and will backfire inside Iran." On December 7, 2004, former U.S. House Representative and Libertarian politician Ron Paul criticized Freedom House for allegedly administering a U.S.-funded program in Ukraine where "much of that money was targeted to assist one particular candidate." Paul said "one part that we do know thus far is that the U.S. government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), granted millions of dollars to the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative (PAUCI), which is administered by the U.S.-based Freedom House. PAUCI then sent U.S. Government funds to numerous Ukrainian non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This would be bad enough and would in itself constitute meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. But, what is worse is that many of these grantee organizations in Ukraine are blatantly in favor of presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko." Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman have criticized the organization for excessively criticizing states opposed to US interests while being unduly sympathetic to regimes supportive of US interests. Most notably, Freedom House described the 1979 Rhodesian general election as "fair", but described the 1980 Southern Rhodesian general election as "dubious", and found the 1982 Salvadoran presidential election to be "admirable".