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On January 18, two days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as president for the second time, Matthew Kaplan, a freelance photojournalist, was arrested and detained while covering an anti-deportation protest in Gary, Indiana. Kaplan said police grabbed him from behind without warning. He was charged with criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, and resisting law enforcement, all of which were dropped two months later. “I don’t really like myself being the story,” he said at the time. “I thought I was just covering a march. I didn’t think I was going to be covering police action or my own arrest.”

Kaplan didn’t let his arrest deter his reporting. And it wasn’t his last brush with law enforcement. Seven months later, on September 26, he covered a demonstration outside an ICE facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview. The center faced allegations of inhumane conditions, the AP reported, such as a lack of food and water and overcrowding so severe that detainees couldn’t sleep. Protesters that day filled the air with the sound of guitars, drums, and megaphones; ICE agents fired back with chemical-weapon dispensers. “Through the worst of the chemical attacks, a group of musicians kept playing and drumming and chanting,” Kaplan said. A guitar, he saw, was smashed by a rubber bullet. While working, Kaplan got shot in the hip with multiple pepper balls. He photographed the moment an ICE agent fired on him through a metal fence. It was a strange sight: a blue-sky day and seventy-seven degrees, yet it looked like he’d been hit with a snowball. His clothes and camera were splashed with a white-powder irritant.

Kaplan’s experiences this year capture in miniature the findings of a new report on violations of press freedom in the United States. The US Press Freedom Tracker, led by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), documented thirty-two instances of journalists arrested or charged for doing their jobs so far in 2025. The vast majority of the incidents occurred during protests against immigration policy. The number of journalists who were arrested is lower than the fifty cases last year, and below a peak of one hundred forty-seven in 2020. But the tracker highlights how journalists in the US covering the right to protest are increasingly “treated as potential participants or even ‘agitators,’ and a camera and notepad [are] seen as threats rather than instruments of accountability.”

The report, shared exclusively with CJR, also records one hundred and seventy assaults against journalists this year—nearly as many as across the previous three years combined. Reporters have been bludgeoned and shot at and pepper-sprayed and shoved by officers of the law this year. Multiple instances saw equipment seized, or damaged to the cost of thousands of dollars. One reporter, after being tackled by a Customs and Border Protection officer, told the FPF: “They didn’t really care that I was a journalist.”

Adam Rose, the FPF’s deputy director of advocacy, told the report’s author that when a reporter is arrested, “we know this chills their rights, but it also ends their shift.” You can’t file a story if your hands are shackled or you’re stuck in a cell. And detaining media workers has a twofold effect: it not only shuts down live reporting, but also elevates the future hazards of covering certain types of story—potentially causing risk-averse newsrooms to opt for self-censorship over confrontation.

In my view, when law enforcers target journalists, their primary aim is not to suppress undesirable information. That would credit officers with too much strategic thinking. At the same time, the notion that officers are ignorant or uninformed about newsgathering’s legal protections strikes me as wide of the mark. The explanation for me is much simpler. Law enforcement officers arrest and assault journalists at protests as a display of power. It is a kind of performance of impunity: a boast, a rhetorical taunt that says, We can get away with it, what are you gonna do?

The FPF’s findings should be viewed as part of a wider assault on independent journalism under the Trump administration. 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. 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. 

One particularly dark episode from this year was the arrest, detention, and removal to El Salvador of Mario Guevara. Guevara, an Emmy-winning reporter and US resident for more than twenty years, was arrested while livestreaming a protest on June 14 in Atlanta. His deportation is thought to be the first case of someone being deported from the US in retaliation for their reporting. 

It’s worth noting, however, that the threats to press freedom documented by the FPF and other organizations are not unique to the Trump era. Worrying trends existed before his presidency. Assaults, intimidation, violent rhetoric, limitations on access, arrests, prosecutions—these are not concerns that will evaporate when Trump leaves office, on January 20, 2029. But what’s clear is that the intensity of the onslaught on independent newsgathering is changing the industry. It is separating the newsrooms that are content to keep their heads down and avoid blowback from those rolling up their sleeves and fighting for the right to report freely. 

The US is not close to becoming a Russia or Iran or Syria in its suppression of the independent media. One consolation is that 90 percent of the media workers arrested in 2025 either never faced charges in court or had them subsequently dropped; they were, after all, carrying out activities protected under the First Amendment. But even if the administration isn’t outright shackling the hands of journalists, under such antagonistic treatment from law enforcement, it’s as if journalists are reporting with one hand tied behind their back.

The hostile environment for journalists seems to be encouraging the emergence of novel reporting skills. Rose, of the FPF, told the US Press Freedom Tracker that one reporter informed him about a new tactic he’d mastered, something “they don’t teach in journalism school.” While detained by law enforcement officers this year, with his wrists strapped with zip ties, he’d learned to pull out his phone and type emergency messages to relatives and editors from behind his back.

Other Notable Stories…
By Jem Bartholomew

• For CJR, Liam Scott reports that today Hong Kong’s High Court convicted Jimmy Lai—a billionaire media mogul and the founder of Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper—on national security charges. The case has been viewed as a barometer for political and press freedom in the semiautonomous territory, which has faced a crackdown from China following pro-democracy protests in 2019–20. Lai, who holds British citizenship, was charged with conspiracy to publish seditious materials in Apple Daily—which was shut down in 2021—as well as conspiracy to collude with foreign forces. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the verdict as “a disgraceful act of persecution,” adding: “Jimmy Lai’s only crime is running a newspaper and defending democracy.” Scott has more here. 
  
• CJR has launched the Journalism 2050 Issue. As Betsy Morais, CJR’s editor in chief, writes, in this issue’s collection of interviews, essays, and reported features, we are looking to the future as if “watching the weather: the way online discourse has embraced debunking, how news delivery has shortened into bullet points and expanded to fill the length of unedited three-hour podcasts, the proliferation of bias monitors cataloguing articles and presenting themselves as arbiters of truth, the appearance of AI-powered widgets that deliver information for the price of data collection, the ascent of the news influencer, the demise of search traffic.” You can read the issue here.
  
• The future of CNN is up in the air. Last Monday, Aida Alami wrote in this newsletter about the nearly eighty-three-billion-dollar agreement that would allow Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. The deal would not have included CNN, which was to be spun off separately. But then Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover bid, which would include CNN. Donald Trump weighed in on the deal last week, attacking CNN publicly and calling for a change in ownership. The battle to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, between the Trump-friendly Ellisons and Netflix, remains ongoing.
  
• The Washington Post has been experimenting with AI-generated, personalized podcasts. It’s not going great. Karen Pensiero, the paper’s top standards editor, said on Thursday in an internal message that a string of errors was “frustrating for all of us,” Semafor’s Max Tani reports. The errors “ranged from relatively minor pronunciation gaffes to significant changes to story content, like misattributing or inventing quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source’s quotes as the paper’s position on an issue,” Tani writes. Since last year, Post owner Jeff Bezos has tried to shed any perception of anti-Trump bias—including only running opinion pieces that evince a belief in “personal liberties” and “free markets,” and forbidding the publication from endorsing Kamala Harris last November. The result, Jon Allsop wrote for CJR in August, has been an exodus of writers and subscribers. 
  
• Belarus released one hundred and twenty-three prisoners on Saturday, including journalists, human rights activists, and opposition politicians, after John Coale, the US’s new special envoy, visited Minsk for talks. The US agreed to lift sanctions on Belarusian potash. Belarus, ruled by dictator Alexander Lukashenko—who adopts a hostile approach to the press and is a key ally of Vladimir Putin’s Russia—has signaled a desire for rapprochement with the West this year. One of the released detainees was Maryna Zolatava, most recently editor in chief of Tut.by before it was shut down. She had been sentenced to twelve years in a penal colony. Reporters Without Borders welcomed the news “with immense relief.” But it added that Zolatava’s release “illustrates the cynicism of Alexander Lukashenko’s regime, which continues to use political prisoners and journalists jailed for their work as a genuine bargaining chip in diplomatic negotiations.” 
  
• This month, both CNN and CNBC have struck deals with Kalshi, a betting platform in the “prediction market” space. The firm allows users to bet on, well, pretty much anything, such as: Will Arsenal win the UEFA Champions League next year? Who will be the Democratic nominee in 2028? Will Kim Kardashian launch a crypto coin this year? The partnerships follow a separate one in November between Yahoo Finance and Polymarket, Kalshi’s competitor. Meghnad Bose wrote for CJR about the role of betting markets in the 2024 election. Last week, Danny Funt, a former CJR Delacorte Fellow, wrote for The New Yorker about how the news “could foreshadow a deluge of similar deals. After all, a decade ago, many outlets refused to even mention sports-betting odds. Then, in a blink, the shilling became inescapable.”
  
• And Arthur L. Carter, an investment banker and news publisher who founded the New York Observer, died at ninety-three on Sunday in Manhattan. After starting the Litchfield County Times, a weekly newspaper, in 1981, he then acquired a majority stake in TheNation in 1985, saying the progressive magazine shaped his values. (He sold The Nation to Victor S. Navasky, then its editor, in 1995.) Carter founded the Observer in 1987, where he prized his writers “for their insider tone and irreverence,” according to his New York Times obituary. Peter Stevenson, a former Observer executive editor, now at Puck, told the Times that Carter “was willing to lose millions because he loved journalism and couldn’t think of a better way to spend his money.”

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