(Dobbs) “Journalism is being asphyxiated by hostile political discourse towards reporters”The United States no longer is a bright spot on the map of nations with good press freedoms.
When nations are ranked for press freedoms, the United States ought to be a bright spot. We have a constitution that is written to guarantee freedom of the press. We have a tradition that has long considered the news media “the Fourth Estate,” a watchdog over government. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Today though, Jefferson’s inclination is widely ignored and globally, the trend lines are sinking. In its 2026 report on press freedoms, the organization Reporters Without Borders— based in Paris and sometimes abbreviated to RSF, for “Reporters Sans Frontières”— began with a disquieting milestone: “For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s countries now fall into the ‘difficult’ or ‘very serious’ categories for press freedom.” The U.S. doesn’t quite make that unenviable cut. But it is in the next worse category: “problematic.” It ought to be in one of the top two categories, “satisfactory” or “good,” but between malevolent lawsuits against major media organizations and harassment of reporters out on the streets legally doing their jobs, press freedoms in the U.S. are moving in the wrong direction. In our numerical ranking this year, out of 180 countries, we are #64, lower than nations that once lived in the Soviet orbit like the Czech Republic (#11), Lithuania (#15), Poland (#27), Slovenia (#36), and Romania (#49). What’s worse, last year we were ranked at least slightly higher, at #57. But this time, Botswana, Japan, Mauritania, Andorra, Samoa, and even a nation that only two decades ago came out of a brutal civil war, Liberia (#58), jumped ahead of us. Several reasons come into play, but it’s hard not to place some of the blame on President Donald J. Trump. Reporters Without Borders explains why: “U.S. President Donald Trump has turned his repeated attacks on the press and journalists into a systematic policy. He has censored government data, attempted to dismantle US public broadcasters, weaponized independent government agencies to punish media that criticize his actions, halted aid funding for media freedom internationally, sued disfavored outlets, and applied pressure to install cronies to lead others.” And, of course, there is his constant hostility toward the White House press corps, in fact toward journalists in the news media wherever they work. Less than a month into his first term, he called the media “the enemy of the people.” He has pushed that unpatriotic portrayal ever since. Just this past Monday, after CNN’s White House reporter Kristen Holmes, in the red dress, asked Trump to comment on caustic statements about him by Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff, the president posted abusive denunciations not just about Ossoff but against Holmes, calling her “a disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession,” and crudely crossing a long-respected line by writing, “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive.” “Callous?” “Vindictive?” He must have been looking in the mirror when he wrote that. You can see on this map that in the rankings of press freedoms, the U.S. falls somewhere between Norway at #1 and Eritrea at #180. The darker the hue, the worse the record. But the map is a bad sign for all the world. This year, press freedoms in more than 50% of the 180 nations are called either “difficult” or “very serious.” Twenty five years ago, only 14% of the nations qualified for that unwanted label. Measured another way, twenty five years ago about a fifth of the world’s population lived in nations where press freedoms were categorized as “good.” Today less than 1% of the world’s people do. Donald Trump doesn’t bear all the blame— press freedoms plummet in nations suffering wars, and over the past 25 years there has been no shortage of those. And as Reporters Without Borders wrote in this new report, “Current protection mechanisms are not strong enough; international law is being undermined and impunity is rife.” But from the day he first took office in 2017, Trump has set the tone and his acolytes leading other nations have matched it. As Reporters Without Borders also wrote, “Journalists are still being killed and imprisoned for their work, but the tactics undermining press freedom are evolving. Journalism is being asphyxiated by hostile political discourse towards reporters, weakened by a faltering media economy, and squeezed by laws being used as weapons against the press.” That conclusion has Donald Trump written all over it. Journalism always has been a tricky business. Over the years that I covered news in nations with hostile relationships with the U.S., let alone at war, I sometimes had to talk my way out of accusations that my crew and I were really working for the CIA. These were nations where leaders could snap their fingers and you would disappear. In war zones it was dangerous just being in line of fire. But it was equally dangerous when we were targeted. At least two of the friends I lost in war zones were targeted because they were journalists. Reporters Without Borders says it’s “looking squarely at the future with a simple question: how much longer will we tolerate the suffocation of journalism, the systematic obstruction of reporters and the continued erosion of press freedom? Although attacks on the right to information are more diverse and sophisticated,” it says, “their perpetrators are now operating in plain sight.” That’s the scariest part. Trump and others are doing what they can to discredit and sometimes silence journalists, and somehow they get away with it. His base laps it up. Share Ronald Reagan once said, “There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our ‘noble experiment’ in self-government.” The trouble is, the current American administration pays no more homage to Ronald Reagan than it does to Thomas Jefferson. Which is why the United States no longer is a bright spot on the map of nations with good press freedoms. © 2026 Greg Dobbs |