If you want to know whether a nation is truly democratic, one measure will give you an answer with near certitude: How does the state treat the press?

Nothing so directly challenges a corrupt or authoritarian leader than an aggressive news media. So, wherever the United States and its Western allies have wielded influence over the formation of a new government in the past half century — from Japan to Iraq — freedom of the press has been a core value the United States has tried to imprint on the culture of each new state. The recent results are mostly discouraging.

I first worked in Iraq in the months after the 2003 invasion, and it was thrilling to see a dozen or more independent Iraqi newspapers for sale on the streets, a new one every week or so. With financial help from the United States, several television stations began broadcasting relatively independent news. After decades of brutal repression, freedom of the press and expression flowered — though, of course bombers and militants made life dangerous and harrowing for journalists and everyone else. At least 170 journalists were killed during the war's first five years.

Today, many of the surviving reporters are scared. The government is censoring, suing and harassing reporters. In July, The Economist reported, police arrested a journalist for taking pictures of a typical, massive Baghdad traffic jam, saying the photos reflected badly on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's campaign to demonstrate that the quality of life was improving.

Last month, about 100 Iraqi journalists staged a raucous protest of growing restrictions on their work, shouting: "No, no to muzzling; yes, yes to freedom!"

The government is now censoring the Internet and certain books, on the pretext of protecting citizens from pornography and hate messages. That is the leading edge of a slippery slope. Reporters Without Borders places Iraq near the bottom of its press freedom index; its ranking continues to fall.

The United States introduced the notion of a free press to Afghanistan in 2002, but during the election in August state security forces assaulted and arrested numerous domestic and foreign journalists reporting on violence during the voting. How could President Hamid Karzai steal the election if the news media had been free to show mayhem and chicanery at the polls? Now we can clearly see that Karzai is not a democrat, and the news media is a victim of that. But then he is not the only villain. Taliban militants have kidnapped dozens of domestic and foreign reporters in recent years and killed four of them.

The United States, NATO and the United Nations practically created the modern state of Kosovo, which proclaimed its independence last year. Like most Central Asian states, newspapers and television stations are generally attached to political parties. Still, some reporters are showing encouraging early signs of independence. But when RTK, the state's lone independent, public-television station, broadcast a news show in the spring that discussed issues such as drug addiction, homosexuality, human rights and press freedom — a novel broadcast for Kosovo — the reporter received death threats, and others in the media launched a smear campaign. Perhaps we should give Kosovo a little more time.

Before that, the United Nations occupied Cambodia in 1993 and 1994 and staged elections with the aim of establishing a new democracy after decades of genocide and war. The United States contributed one-third of the $3 billion spent on this effort. Under U.N. patronage, new newspapers, radio and TV stations began publishing and airing an array of aggressive news reports.

Since that time, however, freedom of the press has been on a slow slide south. Reporters Without Borders ranked Cambodia 71st out of 139 countries in 2002. By 2008, the ranking had slid to 126th out of 173 nations — in the company of Kazakhstan, a dictatorship; and Jordan, a monarchy.

Critics of former President Bush have long argued that, no matter how inspiring those images of Iraqi voters with purple fingers may have been, elections alone cannot create a democracy. The fate of the news media in several new, Western-imposed democracies is a sad but honest demonstration of that.

Joel Brinkley, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is a professor of journalism at Stanford University.