I’m not terribly alarmed that either Britain or the United States will significantly roll back the protections that allow us to hold our governments accountable — up to and including the hot scrutiny of stories like the WikiLeaks disclosures. But the tradition of an aggressive press is not so deeply rooted, or so tolerated, around the world.

“There are so many examples — from Venezuela to Rwanda, from Ecuador to South Africa — where this is a live issue,” said Joel Simon, executive director of the indispensable Committee to Protect Journalists, when I asked about my South African friend’s worry. “And yes, both Jayson Blair and Judy Miller were used by governments to justify their own repressive policies.”

Simon recalls, for example, that each time his agency visited the Venezuelan ambassador to argue against President Hugo Chávez’s repressive press laws, the ambassador pointed out that even the United States, which so proudly wraps itself in the First Amendment, locks up reporters like Miller for refusing to disclose sources.

Few countries are as practiced as Russia in the fine art of holding up a crooked mirror to America. When Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes” asked Vladimir Putin a few years back about the Kremlin’s habit of interfering with news coverage, he retorted, “Don’t you know that some of the American journalists were fired because of their positions on Iraq or the presidential election campaign?” Putin was referring to Dan Rather, who left his CBS anchor job under a cloud after broadcasting a dubious report on George W. Bush’s military record. See? Even in America. . . .

The first oppressive regime to hop on the new hacking bandwagon — at least the first I’ve seen — was Zimbabwe’s, dependable as ever. An Africa watcher from the Committee to Protect Journalists sent me a report from the state-run press service last week, quoting Robert Mugabe’s propagandists on the News of the World scandal: “A media analyst, Mr. Alexander Rusero, said the hacking scandal should serve as a lesson to the third world that the concept of free media is a myth, saying people should judge from the way the British government has reacted to the scandal that even the West cannot practice what they preach.”

Some foreign attempts to constrain press freedom are more understandable than others. It is not hard to fathom why Rwanda, still not fully healed from an ethnic slaughter that was egged on by radio zealots, would look for ways to regulate what it calls “divisionism” in the media. The Egyptian military has some reason to fear that its unsettled protodemocracy might be hijacked by Islamic extremists, which is one pretext for restoring a media-managing Information Ministry that was abolished after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

And autocrats will be autocrats, with or without our bad example. Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chávez would be just as hostile to an unfettered press if no British journalist had ever hacked a phone or if the United States had never jailed Judy Miller.

But do we really want to be held up as role models for repression?

I hoped Rupert Murdoch might use his day in the parliamentary hot seat to make this point. Instead he offered us Singapore — which ranks 152nd out of 195 nations in the Freedom House ranking of press independence — as “the most open and clear society in the world,” where government ministers are paid so lavishly they have no temptation to be corrupt, and thus presumably there is no need for a nosy press. I’m betting that made every paper in Singapore.