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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.”
The same day we reported on the FPF findings, Liam Scott wrote for CJR about Jimmy Lai, the founder of a popular pro-democracy newspaper called Apple Daily: on Monday, a Hong Kong court found Lai guilty of sedition and conspiracy to collude with foreign forces, in what observers across media and diplomacy have called a sham trial. Lai, who is seventy-eight, is expected to spend the rest of his life in prison. “The verdict,” Scott writes, “was seen by many as an indication of the broader collapse of civil liberties and media freedom in Hong Kong since 2020, when China imposed a national security law there.” As Aleksandra Bielakowska, an advocacy manager at the Reporters Without Borders office in Taiwan, tells Scott, “It’s the death of press freedom in Hong Kong.”
In the United States and around the world, journalists are facing extraordinary pressures that undermine the basic functioning of a free press. This is no accident, as Ivan L. Nagy writes for CJR this week: consider the extent to which Trump has made good on the promises laid out in Project 2025. In March, a presidential executive order eliminated the US Agency for Global Media, which pushed full-time staff out on administrative leave and terminated freelance contracts. In April, the Justice Department reversed a Biden-era policy that had blocked federal attorneys from forcing journalists to testify and share their phone records. In July, following Trump’s directive, Congress pulled more than a billion dollars in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Throughout the year, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has driven trained reporters away from briefings and invited in MAGA loyalists—a reflection of the Project 2025 agenda to “reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises.”
In the past year, CJR has documented so many points of friction—in our newsletters, feature reporting, interviews, podcasts, special projects, and more. We have watched heads of state abuse their power and put reporters at risk, and we have watched, too, as other challenges pile on, from the rise of artificial intelligence to the extraordinary influence of content creators, as they claim more turf (and trust) from trained reporters—and maintain highly variable relationships to fact-checking and ethics. None of this is simple: as Bartholomew rightly points out, “the threats to press freedom documented by the FPF and other organizations are not unique to the Trump era.” Nor are all of the changes inherently bad—as we describe in our new Journalism 2050 Issue, alongside danger, technology brings great possibility. And as Riddhi Setty and Carolina Abbott Galvão each note this week, local journalists—such as those at Sahan Journal, in Minnesota, and WPRI-TV, in Rhode Island—persist even under the most difficult circumstances.
CJR is uniquely positioned to help make sense of it all. During this time of giving, I hope you will consider making us a part of your holiday season, and support the work that we do. Your membership will help cover the costs of producing coverage—from the writing to the copyediting to the visual and social media that enable our stories to reach people where they are.
It can also bring new contributors into the fold. In the coming year, we will be welcoming Megan Greenwell—a longtime editor, now the bestselling author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream—as our new host of the Kicker podcast. Greenwell, who also writes features for Bloomberg Businessweek and other publications (including CJR), teaches journalism at Syracuse University and is the deputy director of the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, a workshop and college access initiative for high school students from low-income backgrounds. She has worked for outlets including the Washington Post, New York, Deadspin, and Wired. Stay tuned for her first Kicker episode after the New Year. (And in the meantime, check out our special series, the Journalism 2050 Podcast.)
Susie Bankarim, who you may remember from the amazing audio series on the unraveling of Ozy Media, produced with Josh Hersh, will also be joining CJR, as a regular columnist. Bill Grueskin, our beloved Laurels and Darts writer, will be stepping away for a while—heading off to the Salt Lake Tribune, where he will spend his spring semester as a member of the newsroom. Banikarim, an Emmy-winning journalist and recovering media executive, will bring her own extraordinary experience to the gig: She has worked at ABC News, where she was a producer for Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos, Charlie Gibson, and David Muir. She helped launch Katie Couric’s syndicated talk show, served on Tina Brown’s management team at Newsweek–Daily Beast, oversaw Gizmodo Media Group’s publications, ran global news coverage at Vice, cohosted a culture podcast called In Retrospect, became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and much more. Starting in January, she will be scouring the country’s local journalism terrain and keeping attuned to big, national screwups—all with the sense of levity that is so important to that column.
Thank you, as always, for reading CJR. We’ll keep sharing pieces from the Journalism 2050 Issue—and a bit more—in the coming weeks. Sign up for our newsletter, and I’ll see you again in 2026.
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