The US's fall from #20 is largely a result of arrests of reporters attempting to document the Occupy movement.
While freedom of the press in the US may be violated pragmatically, you'd have a much harder time challenging it philosophically. That is, police offers arresting individual reporters (especially ones involved in protest) slips by relatively easily, but a federal law placing limits on what information the press can publish would receive strong opposition.
So... what? It would be hard for authorities in the US to pass a law restricting speech, so instead they just restrict speech without going through the bother of making a law about it? How is that better?
It's better than restricting speech through law AND enforcement. I'm not supporting the current state of affairs; not at all. Just pointing out that you'd have trouble pushing such a (legal) restriction on the US press.
>It's better than restricting speech through law AND enforcement.
Are you sure about that? If a government passes a law restricting speech because it has to, and then enforces it to restrict speech, it isn't clear to me that's worse than a government which doesn't bother with laws in the first place. Either way, you have no freedom of speech, but at least with the former you still have some semblance of rule of law. That's more important than speech, IMO (although of course without both you're already pretty fucked).
While freedom of the press in the US may be violated pragmatically, you'd have a much harder time challenging it philosophically. That is, police offers arresting individual reporters (especially ones involved in protest) slips by relatively easily, but a federal law placing limits on what information the press can publish would receive strong opposition.