The Safety of Journalists ‘Is No Longer a Given’
Attacks on the press in the U.S. have increased by more than half in the past year.
Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.
I understand that American voters have a lot to worry about when casting their vote. For me, Donald Trump’s denigration of the press is just one of the many, many reasons I will never vote for him. Press freedom is an issue I care deeply about and regard as sacrosanct to our democracy, as do many Americans: 73 percent of adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center this year said that press freedom is extremely or very important to the well-being of society. Which is why today’s news about attacks on the U.S. media is so disturbing.
The Committee to Protect Journalists released a report today that says the safety of journalists “is no longer a given.” The group points to violence, online harassment, legal tests and police attacks as dangerous threats to the media in our intensely divided country, something too many of us working journalists have experienced since Trump came on the scene.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a nonpartisan news website and database on press freedom (of which CPJ is a member), found that physical assaults on journalists linked to their reporting in the U.S. have increased this year by more than 50 percent over 2023. As of September, there were 68 assaults, up from 45 last year. Additionally, a look at the tracker shows that arrests and criminal charges have tripled since 2023. Even so, assaults are down from a high that was nearly 10 times greater in 2020, and arrests and criminal charges so far this year are less than a third of what they were in 2020.
Katherine Jacobsen, CPJ’s U.S., Canada, and Caribbean program coordinator and author of its report, called threats to the media “routine.” Which, in my experience and that of too many of my friends and colleagues, is absolutely true. Just being online with a byline — particularly for women journalists — comes with death threats, rape threats and generally violent near-constant harassment. Personally, I’ve been repeatedly attacked as “fake news” (me, not my stories or the outlets I write for, bizarrely) and blamed for what these vocal Trump supporters see as the left-wing degradation of American society. While the torrent of angry words rarely lead to physical violence, it leaves its toll.
“The scapegoating of journalists not only has consequences for them personally, but also poses grave risks to the public's right to be informed, a core element of any democracy,” Jacobsen said.
Something I found interesting in CPJ’s report was the discussion of “serious threats” to overturn the 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v Sullivan. Sullivan is what gave the U.S. press robust protections when it comes to being sued for defamation by public officials. Apparently, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have both urged the court “to reconsider the Sullivan case and subsequent legal precedent,” CPJ said.
“Threats to the Sullivan case have in turn created an environment in which judges do not dismiss libel cases as quickly as they used to, leading to more protracted and costly legal proceedings, Kate Bolger, a First Amendment and media litigator at the firm Davis Wright Tremaine, told CPJ. This has serious implications for a press that is limping along after decades of being financially squeezed.
Generally, the environment in which journalists — particularly political journalists — work comes with disdain, a fear of legal prosecution and an expectation of vitriol. This not only has implications for those of us who work in the media, but also for the public, whose news intake is potentially curtailed as a byproduct. Repression of the U.S. media also reverberates around the world.
As with many aspects of democracy, the U.S. attitude toward the press has long served as a model for other countries. Our free press and current legal protections of it outshine most, if not all, of the rest of the world’s. What happens here matters to journalists working under stringent government restrictions, and under the thumb of violent cartels or gangs.
Roberson Alphonse, the head of national news at Le Nouvelliste, Haiti’s oldest newspaper, stressed to CPJ that very notion. His country’s leaders monitor what happens here to “see if there is a green light,” he said, “for actions such as calling journalists enemies of the people, as Trump has done.”
Alphonse speaks for many of us, abroad and at home, when he says: “Those people who use that rhetoric are playing with fire — and they need to stop.”
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There is a reason the nations’s founders cared about a free press. Smart people.