Issue:

June 2025

News media are using diverse ways to deflect government attacks on their freedom

In an era when journalists are under physical and digital threat, governments and individuals are getting better at adapting to their changing circumstances, according to journalists, news publishers and legal experts who appeared at The Fight for Global Press Freedom, an event organized recently by the Columbia Journalism School. Some of the stealth tactics used to attempt to muzzle the media include targeted attacks, denial of access, regulatory harassment, and the pressure of civil and criminal lawsuits.

Discussing the state of media in the U.S., Jelani Cobb, dean of the journalism school, and A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, agreed that the first 100 days of the Trump administration had seen an increasingly hostile climate toward the media. “The New York Times now spends ten times more [than in the past] on physical security,” Sulzberger said, citing bomb preparedness training, bulletproof offices, security guards, rescue shelters and other measures.  

Sulzberger said he and a colleague had interviewed media organizations from the U.S., as well as from countries such as Hungary, India, Brazil, and Poland, and compiled a “playbook” of attacks on press freedom by governments, institutions and powerful individuals.   

Sulzberger, who also wrote an opinion piece on the subject for the Washington Post on September 5, just before Donald Trump won the presidency for a second time, said the assault on the media could be divided into phases.

  • Phase 1. Attacking the legitimacy of the press and normalizing everyday harassment with the intention of self-censoring. 
  • Phase 2. The use of the civil courts without even the need to win a case. Weaponization of the legal system by what is called “nuisance lawsuits”, or a single but punishing lawsuit against the media company with the intention of giving them the maximum financial damage: “I had to spend a bit of money, but they had to spend a lot.” 
  • Phase 3. Supporters of the government using the same techniques by filing simultaneous suits in far flung places in the country to drain media organizations’ limited resources.
  • Phase 4. Using regulatory powers: asking regulators to go after news organizations. Examples include a defense contract by Amazon being revoked because Amazon owns the Washington Post, or the denial of certain outlets’ access to the White House briefings, such as Associated Press.

Sulzberger noted that the second Trump administration had become cleverer in its tactics than the first, bringing into White House briefing rooms the likes of Newsmax, the Daily Wire, and Breitbart – mostly conservative and far-right news organizations. “It would be left to these [media organizations to cover the White House], if the New York Times, ABC, the New Yorker, and others moved outside [in solidarity with the AP],” Sulzberger said. Associated Press had been barred from White House press briefings because it refused to comply with a presidential executive renaming Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Sulzberger said he had “great admiration for AP” for pushing back. “Instead of holding their head down, they put the question to the system.”

At any given time, the New York Times has as many as 50 journalists on the ground in war zones – including in Ukraine – “some just yards away from Russian sources” backed by a personal security team traveling with them to ensure their safety, Sulzberger said.

Digital harassment, racist and misogynistic messages pose new dangers to journalists’ security in cyberspace, including death threats against family members, doxing, and false allegations of crime. One of Sulzberger’s colleagues received so many threats - around 700 a day – that postal workers started leaving a basket near the colleague’s desk. “It requires a ton of personal resistance” to counter these attempts to permanently damage journalists’ professional reputations, Sulzberger said.

Polarized U.S. media landscape

Attacks on “the legitimacy, rights and safety” of the media intensified as the Trump administration reached its first 100 days, according to Sulzberger, whose newspaper Trump has labelled “the failing/fake news/enemy of the people NYTimes”.

Other recent examples of anti-press rhetoric in the U.S. include the March closure of the Voice of America and the laying off of its reporters as part of a DOGE crackdown, and a congressional hearing titled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable”, accusing the two taxpayer-funded organizations of producing “biased news coverage for an increasingly narrow and elitist audience”. Even that stalwart of press freedom in the U.S., the 1964 landmark case of New York Times Co. vs. Sullivan, is being scrutinized to see if it can be revoked. 

Freedom of the press in the U.S. has a 250-year bipartisan history and is legally protected by the First Amendment of the constitution. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, said: “I’d rather have the press without a government than a government without the press.” 

Unlike the more dramatic pressure exerted in countries such as Russia and China, threats again the U.S. are of a more “technocratic” nature, which is even more dangerous as it has become normalized “like a boring movie that no one cares about”, Sulzberger said. 

“Freedom of press is the freedom for people ... to be informed of what’s happening in your neighborhood and the world … and a requirement for active citizenship,” he added.

“As a profession, our job is to have an informed public … we ask tough questions that they don’t want to answer and that they don’t want the public to know … How can the world's most powerful military, expensive health care, and biggest economy keep losing wars, be so unhealthy, be so unequal?”

Threats in new forms

In the second part of the event, four foreign journalists discussed threats in their countries and how their news organizations’ approach to countering attacks on press freedom differ from those in the West.     

Brazilian journalist Juliana del Pava is part of a center for investigative journalists and produces a podcast about the corruption allegations against the former Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro. She said Bolsonaro’s lawyer had threatened her with legal action after the podcast was aired. She made the threats public and sued the lawyer. She also received misogynistic messages. “I will always be a target,” she said.

India, the largest democracy in the world, no longer has a free press, said Siddharth Varadarajan, former editor of the English-language national daily the Hindu. “If you went back a year or two before [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi’s election, you could read relentless criticism of [his predecessor] Manmohan Singh’s government; accusations of corruption; scams; and gang rape. Today it has completely changed,” Varadarajan said. 

Authorities have used civil suits as a form of harassment and are now turning to criminal law, or what Varadarajan calls “clawfare.”

”If you’re reporting on hate speech, you get slapped with hate speech and threats of detention!” he said, adding that the Modi government had also asked digital media companies “to register and agree to the official broadcast code, and what is lawful and valid. They also use direct pressure or through social media to take the story down.” The government has also weaponized “big media against democracy and common sense. They echo the government narrative and the guys in the media justify it”, Varadarajan said.

Aida Alami, a Moroccan journalist who teaches international reporting at Columbia Journalism School, was inspired by a journalist who went on hunger strike when Alami was at high school. The media environment in the Middle East has seen a decline in freedom, she said, due to greater digital surveillance, online harassment, and trolling.

 “After [graduating from] journalism school, I wasn’t sure what the red lines were,” she said. Other colleagues "have been through hell", she added. "They can defend themselves, but these charges are humiliating”. She implored journalists to maintain a united front in the face of attacks on press freedoms. “It’s harder to attack when there’s a bigger number of you doing the story.”

András Pethő, co-founder and director of Direkt36, one of Hungary’s few remaining independent investigative media outlets, said that nearly all organizations in his country were controlled by the government or powerful businessmen, and under the influence of Viktor Orbán, who has been in power for 15 years.

“We’re not in physical danger but more under legal threats … Hungary is still a much better and safer place than a lot of places … you can still do independent journalism, but you pay a price for it,” he said.

In Hungary, hundreds of TV and radio outlets, and local and national newspapers are closing down, and journalists are losing their jobs, Pethö said. Direkt36 was set up 10 years ago to enable Pethö and his colleagues to fight Orban’s propaganda machine. “This machine attacks anyone that the government sees as an enemy. Journalists, civil activists have been called ‘stink bugs’ and labelled foreign agents or traitors,” he said, adding that two of his colleagues had been tracked by the secret service using Pegasus spyware.  

Vive la resistance?

Varadarajan highlighted the value of resistance against threats. “You can’t self-censor and allow the government to taste blood,” he said. “The lower the court, the more prone the judiciary to government pressure.” Having been “Pegasus-ed” twice, Varadarajan said he now preferred to meet sources face-to-face.

Juliana del Pava believed her podcast had made waves because it found a new way present the facts about Bolsonaro. “Then I wrote a book about the behind the scenes and it reached even more audiences,” she said.

Alami, meanwhile, said discussions on her Signal groups ranged from the killing of colleagues in Gaza; sentencing in Tunisia; and jailing and exile in Morocco and Egypt. Acknowledging that Western media organizations function differently from those in the rest of the world, she said: “When AP got banned [from the White House] there wasn’t an uprising. We [in the Middle East] would have boycotted [the briefings].”

Pethő, however, cautioned against pushing back too hard. ”If you engage directly, you’ll be viewed as an opposition, and it may damage your credibility,” he said. “It’s better to turn towards your audience and tell them that these guys don’t want you to hear the stories about corruption, public services, and the economy. [Audiences] are your only allies in the struggle.”

Ilgin Yorulmaz is a freelance reporter for BBC World Turkish and co-chair of the FCCJ Freedom of the Press Committee.