The public’s right to know is in serious jeopardy in the United States.
The country that once proudly lauded its commitment to free expression and a free press has rapidly adopted the behavior of autocrats to stifle reporting it does not like.
From new rules that threaten the ability of journalists to report on defence (the country’s largest federal employer and third largest expenditure) to spurious lawsuits from the President against news outlets whose reporting he dislikes (some of whom settled, apparently in fear of greater punishment) to regulatory overreach and the gutting of public media, the United States looks less like the champion of a free press and more like its nemesis.
This is not hyperbole.
The organisation that I run – the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) – has worked on issues related to press freedom and journalists’ safety for more than four decades.
Since 1992, we have meticulously documented the killings, arrests, and disappearances of journalists.
We know, and academic research shows, that media censorship – tighter regulations, funding cuts (coupled with investments in pliant media), smear campaigns and legal threats – are a precursor to the curtailment of broader freedoms and rights.
And we are seeing precisely that in the United States – not just in real time but at high speed.
What began with the White House banning the Associated Press from its press pool (and thus the hundreds of news outlets across the country that rely on its services) in January has since morphed into a multi-pronged attack on the press.
The attack vectors are familiar to us at CPJ as keen observers of autocratic behaviour:
the misuse of law to attack news outlets deemed unfriendly to the regime (this has included lawsuits from Trump against ABC News, CBS News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times); the increased politicisation of the regulator (ABC briefly suspended comedian Jimmy Kimmel after the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, objected to remarks Kimmel had made on air and said “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told the right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson.
“These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Kimmel was reinstated but some operators continued to refuse to carry the show); and the slashing of funding for public media (the Trump administration has all but eliminated funding that was going to support independent media overseas, gutted entities such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, and slashed funding for public media at home to the bone).
This matters not because the press is special per se.
It matters because of the role the press plays: the role of holding power to account, of exposing corruption and wrongdoing, of helping people access to the information that is vital to their everyday lives.
When wildfires ripped through California earlier this year, for example, listenership to the local radio station KNX News rose 354 percent as anxious locals turned to the reliable sources with on the ground reporters to understand what was happening and help mitigate risk.
When a free press is curtailed, individual freedoms – which rely on having access to independent information – are too.
Fighting back now matters because a failure to address these curtailments – impunity – creates a breeding ground for further restrictions, as we’ve seen before from Buenos Aires to Budapest.
And just as restrictions take a multi-pronged approach, so too must resistance.
Thankfully, we are seeing such resistance.
We’re seeing it in the use of legal avenues to challenge administrative overreach. So far this year CPJ has supported eight court submissions led by our colleagues at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), that aim to reverse decisions that threaten a free press.
We, along with Free Press, have also pushed for and vigorously supported the ACLU’s habeas corpus case to challenge the wrongful detention and eventual deportation of journalist Mario Guevara.
With colleagues at IWMF, Freedom of the Press Foundation, PEN America, and RCFP, we’re stepping up the provision of safety training and advice.
And we’re seeing journalists and newsrooms – though sadly not all – refuse to be cowed.
It is easy to say support certain freedoms and rights when those rights are not contested.
The real test is the willingness to do so, even – and especially when – that defence brings potential significant risk.
Impunity – and therefore the persistent erosion of rights – flourishes when those who purport to believe in these rights – and indeed benefit from them – fall silent.
George Orwell called this out in his original planned preface to Animal Farm when he noted: “…the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI [Ministry of Information] or any official body.
“If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.
“In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.”
Tackling impunity, then, in the United States as elsewhere, requires of us all a basic first step: a refusal to be silent.
*The views expressed are those of the author Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
