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committee to protect journalists
Reporters Without Borders Sounds Alarm Over Trump Effort to 'Bring the Press Into Line'
RSF says Trump's moves "have jeopardized the country's news outlets and indicate that he intends to follow through on his threats, setting up a potential crisis for American journalism."
May 02, 2025
Press freedom in the United States has fallen to its lowest level since Reporters Without Borders began publishing its annual ranking more than 20 years ago, with President Donald Trump's return to power "greatly exacerbating the situation," RSF said Friday.
The U.S. fell from 55th to 57th place on RSF's World Press Freedom Index, marking the second straight year that the situation in the country which lists freedom of the press first in its Bill of Rights has been classified as "problematic." The report comes ahead of World Press Freedom Day on May 3.
The U.S. has been trending downward on RSF's index since 2013, when it ranked 32nd in global press freedom. A decade later, it had fallen to 45th place before plunging to 55th place last year amid Trump's attacks on the media.
"Trump was elected to a second term after a campaign in which he denigrated the press on a daily basis and made explicit threats to weaponize the federal government against the media," the report states.
Press freedom in the United States has hit a record low, according to the latest World Press Freedom Index published annually by Reporters Without Borders.
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— Axios (@axios.com) May 1, 2025 at 9:03 PM
"His early moves in his second mandate to politicize the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), banThe Associated Press from the White House, or dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media, for example, have jeopardized the country's news outlets and indicate that he intends to follow through on his threats, setting up a potential crisis for American journalism," the publication continues, accusing Trump of using "false economic pretexts" to "bring the press into line."
"The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides broad protections for the press. However, no meaningful press freedom legislation has been passed at the national level in recent years despite the country's consistent slide on the Press Freedom Index," the report notes. "The PRESS Act, a federal shield law, failed to pass for a second successive time in 2024. More than a dozen states and communities have proposed or enacted laws to limit journalists' access to public spaces, including barring them from legislative meetings and preventing them from recording the police."
RSF continued:
Economic constraints have a considerable impact on journalists. Roughly one-third of the American newspapers operating in 2005 have now shuttered. While some public media outlets, and radio stations in particular, have been able to offset this decline thanks to online subscription models, others have found ways to sustain growth through individual donations. Massive waves of layoffs swept the U.S. media throughout 2023 and 2024 and have continued into 2025, affecting both local newsrooms and major legacy outlets. Many parts of the country are now considered news deserts, with the disappearance of local news outlets reaching crisis levels. Since 2022, more than 8,000 journalists have been laid off in the U.S.
Furthermore, "more Americans have no trust in the media than trust it a fair amount. Online harassment, particularly towards women and minorities, is also a serious issue for journalists and can impact their quality of life and safety."
"Politicians' open disdain for the media has trickled down to the public," RSF added. "Journalists reporting on the ground can face harassment, intimidation, and assault while working. When covering demonstrations, journalists are sometimes attacked and physically assaulted by protestors or wrongfully arrested by police. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, there were 49 journalist arrests in 2024 compared to only 15 in 2023. The last journalist to be killed in the course of his work was Dylan Lyons in February of 2023."
RSF paints a grim picture for journalism around the world.
"The conditions for practicing journalism are bad in half of the world's countries," as "less than 1% of the world's population lives in a country where press freedom is fully guaranteed," the report states.
Noting that economic self-sufficiency is critical to a free press, RSF editorial director Anne Bocandé said in a statement that "guaranteeing freedom, independence,s and plurality in today's media landscape requires stable and transparent financial conditions."
"Without economic independence, there can be no free press," Bocandé continued. "When news media are financially strained, they are drawn into a race to attract audiences at the expense of quality reporting, and can fall prey to the oligarchs and public authorities who seek to exploit them. When journalists are impoverished, they no longer have the means to resist the enemies of the press—those who champion disinformation and propaganda."
"The media economy must urgently be restored to a state that is conducive to journalism and ensures the production of reliable information, which is inherently costly," she added. "Solutions exist and must be deployed on a large scale. The media's financial independence is a necessary condition for ensuring free, trustworthy information that serves the public interest."
RSF's new rankings come days after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi ended a Biden administration policy that strictly limited the Justice Department's authority to seize journalists' records and compel them to testify in leak investigations.
On Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) published a report on Trump's first 100 days in office, which the group said were "marked by a flurry of executive actions that have created a chilling effect and have the potential to curtail media freedoms."
"It is disturbing that, on the eve of #WorldPressFreedomDay, the Trump administration has dealt major blows to journalists and the public they serve." — Katherine Jacobsen, CPJ's U.S., Canada, and Caribbean program coordinator
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— Committee to Protect Journalists (@pressfreedom.bsky.social) May 2, 2025 at 9:09 AM
"From denying access to upending respect for the independence of a free press to vilifying news organizations to threatening reprisals, this administration has begun to exert its power to punish or reward based on coverage," CPJ said. "Whether in the states or on the streets, this behavior is setting a new standard for how the public can treat journalists."
"The uncertainty and fear resulting from these actions have caused requests for safety advice to increase as journalists and newsrooms aim to prepare for what might be next," the group added. "These moves represent a notable escalation from the first Trump administration, which also pursued banning and deriding elements of the press. After nearly a decade of repeating insults and falsehoods, and filing lawsuits, Trump has normalized disdain for media to an alarming degree."
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Photojournalist Fatma Hassona, Subject of Doc Headed to Cannes, Killed in Gaza
"Her smile was as magical as her tenacity: bearing witness, photographing Gaza, distributing food despite the bombs, mourning, and hunger," said ACID, a Cannes Festival parallel section.
Apr 18, 2025
The Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona was killed alongside several other members of her family on Wednesday when an Israeli airstrike hit her home in northern Gaza, just 24 hours after it was announced that a documentary in which she is the main character was selected to premier in May at ACID, a Cannes Festival parallel section.
"Yesterday another Palestinian reporter was killed in Gaza," wrote Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, on Thursday. "Her crime was to chronicle the genocide through powerful articles and photos. What a genocidal regime cannot allow."
Hassona, 25, was a multimedia graduate from the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza, according to Le Monde, and was known for her photographs of life in the Gaza Strip and for documenting Israel's destruction of the enclave.
According to The Guardian, the strike that killed Hassona also killed 10 members of her family, including her pregnant sister. Hassona was also days away from getting married.
The documentary that is set to premier at Cannes is by the French-Iranian director Sepideh Farsi and is titled Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk.
"Her smile was as magical as her tenacity: bearing witness, photographing Gaza, distributing food despite the bombs, mourning, and hunger. We heard her story, rejoiced at each of her appearances to see her alive, we feared for her," the ACID said in statement on Thursday. "We had watched and programmed a film in which this young woman's life force seemed like a miracle. This is no longer the same film that we are going to support and present in all theaters, starting with Cannes. All of us, filmmakers and spectators alike, must be worthy of her light."
In an opinion piece for the French paper Libération that was originally published in French, Farsi said she got to know Hassona through a Palestinian friend located in Cairo.
"I was looking for an answer to a question that is both simple and complex. How do you stand under the siege? How do you live under the bombs?" she wrote.In October 2023, Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing over 1,000 people and taking roughly 250 hostages—prompting Israel to carry out a fierce military campaign in the Gaza Strip that has killed over 50,000 people, according to local health officials there
Multiple human rights groups have said Israel is guilty of committing genocide or "acts of genocide."
"Preliminary investigations" by the press freedom group the Committee to Protect Journalists found that as of April 16, at least 175 journalists and media workers were among the more than tens of thousands killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon since the start of the war. Palestinians account for 167 of those deaths. Other tallies put the figure at over 200 in Gaza alone.
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Journalist Burned Alive in Tent Strike Among Scores of Gazans Killed by Israeli Forces
"How many more Israeli war crimes do we need to witness?" asked one Australian journalist.
Apr 07, 2025
Scores of Palestinians have been killed by Israel Defense Forces' bombing of the Gaza Strip since Sunday, including numerous children as well as a journalist who was burned alive in a Monday strike targeting a tent full of sleeping journalists.
The IDF strike on the journalists' tent outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza at approximately 2:00 am local time Monday killed Palestine Today reporter Hilmi al-Faqaawi and another man, identified as Yusuf Al-Khazandar, both of whom burned to death as helpless bystanders tried but were unable to rescue them from the flames.
Al Jazeerareported that nine other people—including journalists Hassan Eslaih, Ahmed al-Agha, Muhammad Fayek, Abdallah Al-Attar, Ihab al-Bardini, and Mahmoud Awad—were injured in the strike. Palestine's Quds News Network published footage of the burning tent, as well as Eslaih and al-Bardini in the hospital, the latter suffering from wounds to his head caused by shrapnel, a fragment of which pierced one of his eyes.
"The international community's failure to act has allowed these attacks on the press to continue with impunity."
The IDF said it carried out the strike in a bid to assassinate Eslaih, whom it accused of being a member of Hamas' Khan Younis Brigade posing as a journalist, partly because of his on-the-ground coverage of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel. Eslaih, who previously worked for The Associated Press and CNN, had repeatedly been threatened by Israel amid his tireless coverage of its annihilation of Gaza.
The latest attack on journalists by Israel—which has killed well over 200 media professionals since October 2023—drew global condemnation and calls for U.S. corporate media to give more coverage to Israeli targeting of media professionals.
"This is not the first time Israel has targeted a tent sheltering journalists in Gaza. The international community's failure to act has allowed these attacks on the press to continue with impunity, undermining efforts to hold perpetrators accountable," said Sara Qudah, the Middle East and North Africa director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. "CPJ calls on authorities to allow the injured, some of whom have sustained severe burns, to be evacuated immediately for treatment and to stop attacking Gaza’s already devastated press corps."
🚨CPJ denounces Israel’s targeted airstrike that hit a media tent in southern Gaza on Monday, killing one journalist and injuring eight others, and calls on the international community to act to stop Israel killing Palestinian journalists. Read more: cpj.org?p=470309
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— Committee to Protect Journalists (@pressfreedom.bsky.social) April 7, 2025 at 10:09 AM
The Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement, "We call on all U.S. media outlets to air the video of journalists burning alive in their media tent after the Israeli government's bombing."
"Journalists must be the first in line to expose the intentional mass murder of fellow journalists, and the American people must be able to see the horror perpetrated in Gaza with American weapons and taxpayer dollars," CAIR added. "We call on every state and national association of journalists to condemn the Israeli government's bombing of a media tent in Gaza and express solidarity with the Palestinian journalists facing targeted assassination for just doing their jobs."
Antoinette Lattouf, a prolific Australian journalist, wrote on the Bluesky social network: "I feel physically ill. How are images of Palestinian journalists being burned alive not top story on every news site? This is after we watched the execution of paramedics. How many more Israeli war crimes do we need to witness? Or have we accepted our institutions and their so-called values are a lie?"
Monday's strikes followed Sunday bombing that killed dozens of Palestinians, including strikes on the al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City that reportedly left 11 Palestinians, including nine children, dead and many others wounded. Other deadly IDF air and artillery strikes were also reported in cities including Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. These attacks included an airstrike on a community kitchen in Khan Younis that killed seven people, at least three of whom were reportedly children.
Since October 2023, Israel's bombing, invasion, and "complete siege" of Gaza have left more than 180,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. Israel's policies and practices in the war are the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case brought by South Africa and backed by more than 30 nations and regional blocs.
Additionally, nearly everyone in Gaza has been forcibly displaced, sometimes multiple times, as Israeli forces move to seize large tracts of the Gaza Strip for a so-called "security zone" and Jewish recolonization. Israeli officials claim this ethnic cleansing is being carried out in coordination with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has walked back some of his earlier comments asserting that the United States would "take over" Gaza, empty it of Palestinians, and build the "Riviera of the Middle East" in the Mediterranean enclave.
On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in the United States from Hungary for talks with Trump and others on topics including Gaza, the hostages held by Hamas, Iran policy, and the 17% tariff Trump imposed on Israel last week, even though the country—which counts the U.S. as its biggest trade partner—lifted all levies on American imports in a bid to avert the move.
The Israeli newspaper
Haaretzreported that Netanyahu's aircraft deviated from the normal Budapest-Washington, D.C. route by about 250 miles (400 km) to avoid the airspace of the Netherlands, Ireland, and Iceland, which officials feared could enforce arrest warrants issued last year by the International Criminal Court against the prime minister for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including using starvation as a weapon of war. Far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Trump have both rejected the warrants, and the latter has sanctioned the ICC.
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