A Year Under Pressure

Assaults on press freedom, at home and abroad—which CJR is uniquely positioned to cover.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Mario Guevara, whose case represented “a singular and devastating blow to this country’s commitment to freedom of the press” and also had a near-allegorical feeling, of forces closing in. This week, Jem Bartholomew writes about a new report shared with CJR by the US Press Freedom Tracker, led by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), which documented thirty-two instances of journalists being arrested or charged for doing their jobs in America in 2025. The report also recorded a hundred and seventy assaults against journalists in the past year: “nearly as many as across the previous three years combined,” Bartholomew notes. “Reporters have been bludgeoned and shot at and pepper-sprayed and shoved by officers of the law.”

These findings, Bartholomew argues, should be viewed as part of a broader assault on journalism under Donald Trump. “News organizations have been targeted with frivolous lawsuits; veteran reporters at the Pentagon and White House have been replaced with MAGA propagandists; news networks have been bashed by the president and earmarked for right-wing transformation by his billionaire allies,” he writes. “The Committee to Protect Journalists has said journalists ‘are facing extraordinary and intensifying pressures’ under Trump 2.0 and that press freedom is ‘no longer a given in the United States.’ This year, the US slumped to fifty-seventh in Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index, ranking below Sierra Leone, Romania, and Liberia.”