A survey of local journalists has rated the nation’s freedom of the press currently stands at its highest level since 2007. 

The survey released on Thursday by the Korea Press Foundation measured reporting freedom at three-point-44 points on a scale from zero to five with five denoting the the most amount of rights they think they can attain 

It is the highest since three-point-35 points measured in 2007. Press freedom since 2007 had gradually declined to two-point-85 points in 2017 before rebounding to three-point-31 points in 2019. 

Some 62-point-four percent of those polled chose advertisers as the biggest constraining factors directly or indirectly imposing limitations, followed by editors and senior journalists at 47 percent and owners of media companies at 43-point-four percent. 

The biennial survey was conducted on- and off-line on two-thousand-14 journalists at newspapers, broadcasters, news agencies and online media outlets between July 19 and October 5. 

It had a confidence level of 95 percent with a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.