Statistics fun: Freedom House vs. HRW

I am no math wizard, but I was wondering after my last blog post  if there was any correlation - positive or negative - between the scores that Freedom House uses to determine how free a country is, and how much attention that country receives by Human Rights Watch, in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA.)

I calculated Freedom House's score by adding their two values for political rights and civil liberties, each on a scale of 1-7, so the freest countries would have a score of 2 and the least free a score of 14.

I used Google to estimate the number of mentions of each country at the HRW.com site.

Here is a chart with the raw numbers.

Country	HRW mentions	Freedom House score
Oman	328	11
Qatar	456	11
Bahrain	460	11
Algeria	787	11
Yemen	999	11
Morocco	1060	9
Kuwait	1130	9
UAE(+United Arab Emirates)	1200	11
Libya	1240	14
Jordan	1300	11
Lebanon	1450	8
Syria	1510	13
Tunisia	1530	12
Egypt	1930	11
Iraq	2170	11
Israel	3940	3
Saudi Arabia	4140	13
Iran	5730	12

And graphically (I normalized the freedom score to put them on the same visual scale):

In a sane world, one would expect a positive correlation between how unfree a nation is and how many mentions it receives in Human Rights Watch. However, there is practically no correlation between the two mathematically in the MENA region - in fact, there is a weak negative correlation between them (-0.13).

Perhaps a reader will take it upon himself to see if this lack or correlation extends to other parts of the world, or if it is only in the Middle East that HRW's emphasis is so skewed.