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Last summer, the Biden administration secured the freedom of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva—a dual US and Russian citizen who works for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US-funded international broadcaster that covers often repressive countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and beyond—as part of a broader prisoner swap with Russia. The swap was the biggest since the end of the Cold War and also included Russian political prisoners, though as I noted at the time, many journalists remained in jail in Russia and allied territories, including a trio who worked for RFE/RL: Vladyslav Yesypenko, in Russian-occupied Crimea, and Ihar Losik and Andrey Kuznechyk, in Russian-aligned Belarus. (Belarus was seemingly involved in the swap, and exiled opposition leaders from the country faced questions as to whether they’d pushed hard enough to ensure that Belarusian political prisoners were included. They said they had.)
An RFE/RL official noted to me at the time that the broadcaster planned to leverage relationships and expertise generated in its campaign on behalf of Kurmasheva to free the other reporters, and that the campaign had raised their profile—but they remained less well-known in the US even than Kurmasheva, whose imprisonment had, in turn, gotten much less attention than that of Gershkovich. As the months ticked by, initial diplomatic momentum in their cases appeared to dissipate. Last month, ahead of elections that President Alexander Lukashenko inevitably won, Belarusian state TV broadcast a series of so-called interviews with Losik, Kuznechyk, and a former RFE/RL journalist, Ihar Karney, in an apparent bid to present the broadcaster as an extremist organization bent on burning the country to the ground.
It was thus a surprise when, last week, Belarus freed Kuznechyk, alongside an activist and an unnamed US citizen; their release was not, it seems, part of a prisoner swap, but did follow close engagement on the part of the Trump administration, including a visit from Christopher W. Smith, a deputy assistant secretary of state who became the highest-ranking US official to go to the country since the last time Trump was in office. In a statement at the time, Stephen Capus, the president and CEO of RFE/RL, credited Trump with freeing Kuznechyk. Capus told me yesterday that he senses bipartisan support, including inside the new administration, for freeing journalists who have been imprisoned for carrying out RFE/RL’s mission of holding authoritarian regimes accountable, and in so doing representing “America’s core values.” Kuznechyk had been jailed for more than three years, but then, “three weeks into a new administration, he’s home, reunited with his family,” Capus told me. “That’s remarkable. And it’s not a coincidence. None of this happened by accident. This was a determined effort of the Trump administration to free one of our people.”
Nor was this an isolated incident (even if the particulars of hostage negotiations with foreign states are typically murky, making the drawing of connections between them an inexact science). Trump made hostage recovery a priority in his first term, and in just a few weeks of his second, his administration has apparently succeeded in freeing not only Kuznechyk and the pair of people released alongside him, but another US citizen jailed in Belarus and two jailed in Russia, including the schoolteacher Marc Fogel. And, as far as journalists go, Trump and Elon Musk, his new top adviser, have been credited with at least tangential involvement in the freeing of Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist jailed in Iran in December in apparent retaliation for Italy’s arrest of an Iranian engineer wanted by the US. Sala (and the engineer) were released before Trump took office, but Reuters reported that a pre-inauguration visit by Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, to Mar-a-Lago played some role; according to the New York Times, Musk reached out to Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations after that meeting and after separately being contacted (via an intermediary) by Sala’s boyfriend. Musk denied the outreach, saying that he played only a “small role” in recommending US support, and a top Italian official denied that he was involved at all. But Sala has suggested that he may have been a “fundamental person” in her release, and her mother has reportedly promised to make him pasta as a thank-you. (The outgoing Biden administration, for its part, reportedly disapproved of the deal, describing it as “an Italian decision from soup to nuts.”)
Then there’s the case of Austin Tice, the US journalist who went missing while covering the war in Syria in 2012. During his first term, Trump took an interest in Tice’s case (on at least one occasion, he reportedly sent a handwritten note to Tice’s mother, Debra) and eventually wrote to Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, proposing direct talks on the matter. According to the Journal, Trump eventually dispatched an adviser named Kash Patel to Damascus to conduct the highest-level talks between the US and the Assad regime since the war began, though they didn’t get very far; Patel would later say that failing to get Tice home was “probably one of my biggest failures under the Trump administration.” Then, late last year, the Assad regime unexpectedly collapsed, raising fresh hopes of Tice’s return. On the day that Trump was inaugurated, Debra Tice, who had been critical of the Biden administration for not trying hard enough to get her son back, visited Syria and told reporters that she had “great hope” that Trump would work diligently to do so. “His people have already reached out to me,” Debra said, of Trump. “I haven’t experienced that for the last four years.” (The Tice family did not respond to my request for an interview.)
Whatever their particulars, these stories all point to a glaring contradiction with how Trump and those in his orbit tend to treat journalists at home—and even, in other contexts, abroad. Trump’s own bashing of the press needs no introduction. Patel has threatened to “come after” the media and may now have the chance to do so as Trump’s pick for FBI director. Just the other day, Musk suggested on X that the staff of the CBS show 60 Minutes deserve “a long prison sentence.” He has also criticized the US Agency for International Development’s funding of journalism (which often goes to newsrooms in repressive climates) while taking a broader buzzsaw to the agency, and has separately called for RFE/RL to be shut down, describing the broadcaster as “radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.” (Plus, he said, “Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Hello??” Capus told me: “We look forward to engaging with Mr. Musk on this issue, because the way he defined our mission and the price tag he put on it is not accurate.”)
And yet, in the relatively narrow area of freeing unjustly imprisoned journalists overseas, the new administration does not seem, at least at first glance, to present much of a difference from its predecessor, and could even be perceived as an improvement in some ways. This invites several questions. Why? Does it reflect an unexpected commitment to press freedom, at least in some small way? And, in a policy area that always involves difficult trade-offs, what are the downsides?
Part of the story appears to be about bureaucratic engagement and continuity between successive administrations of different parties. Observers noted to me that Robert O’Brien, who served as special envoy for hostage affairs in Trump’s first term, was then promoted to national security adviser; his successor, Roger Carstens (who attended the Syria meeting with Patel in 2020), stayed on for the entirety of Biden’s term; his Trump-picked successor, Adam Boehler, is seemingly regarded as a serious person. Bill McCarren, the director of the new Press Freedom Center at the National Press Club, told me that there was also a “very businesslike” transition between Trump’s and Biden’s National Security Councils after both of the past two elections, and that similar can be said of Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, and his successor, Marco Rubio, even if they have different views and approaches. Trump himself, meanwhile, still appears to see hostage recovery as a priority. “He really grasps that, for some reason,” McCarren said, adding that Trump seems to be more interested in it than he is in “the more abstruse aspects of policy.”
One possible reason for this, some observers note, is that getting jailed Americans home is a feel-good story that is easy for other Americans to grasp and visualize, and for the media to cover—one that is also liable to win praise for a notoriously egotistical president, even if he is far from the only one to have mined hostage releases for political capital. (Last week, Trump greeted Fogel, the teacher freed by Russia, in front of the cameras at the White House, with Fogel draped in an American flag.) “It’s got a certain conclusion that’s an obvious win,” McCarren said, “whereas broader policy agendas may take a decade to point to and say this was successful.” Joel Simon—a CJR contributor and founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, who has also written a book about hostage negotiations—told me that the political benefit of such deals often comes with a wider “strategic cost.” This “paralyzed” the Obama administration, Simon argues; Biden’s team recognized that negotiations were necessary to do deals, but still “agonized” over them. Trump, on the other hand, seems “indifferent” to such costs.
The benefits of Trump’s approach aren’t merely accruing to US citizens, if the cases of Kuznechyk and possibly Sala are any guide. But Simon and others argue that status as a journalist is “incidental” to Trump’s approach. Indeed, there are concerns that his hostility to press freedom at home—and famously transactional nature—could complicate future efforts to get jailed reporters home. As Simon pointed out to me, US newsrooms whose staffers are detained overseas face a dilemma: they’re reliant on the US government for diplomatic assistance, but must continue to cover that government critically. There’s no evidence that the Journal, for instance, pulled punches while working with the Biden administration to get Gershkovich out of Russia; indeed, in the weeks prior to his release, it published some very tough stories about Biden’s age. But “that’s all norms,” Simon said. “And there are no norms with Trump.”
And in a geopolitical sense, strategic costs are not as abstract as they might sound. Prisoner swaps like the one involving Gershkovich often entail trading people who did nothing wrong for dangerous criminals—not to mention, as some observers noted at the time of the Gershkovich deal, the risk of validating hostile states’ growing practice of taking hostages for diplomatic leverage. Paul Beckett, who led the Journal’s efforts to free Gershkovich (and has since left the paper), told me in an email that Trump’s people have made it clear that they don’t like the idea of direct prisoner swaps (though they did appear to trade a convicted Russian cybercriminal for Fogel). The result is that it is “not always apparent what was sought or given in return or where a hostage’s return fits in the grand scheme of American geopolitics over, for instance, securing an end to the war in Ukraine,” Beckett said.
Russian president Vladimir Putin currently appears to be flattering Trump as talks to end the Ukraine war get underway—without the participation of Europe or of Ukraine, at least for now; yesterday, Russia released another American prisoner, Kalob Byers Wayne, and suggested that it was a goodwill gesture in the context of those talks. Of course, the broader consequences for press freedom of giving Putin a freer hand in Europe could be absolutely disastrous. In the case of Belarus, US officials may have insisted that the recent release of Kuznechyk and others was “unilateral,” but the Times reports that the country might be seeking to trade the further release of political prisoners for a rapprochement with the US, including sanctions relief. In isolation, this would be a welcome development for press freedom; it could, perhaps, help RFE/RL’s Losik and its former staffer Karney get out of jail. But Lukashenko seems unlikely to suddenly start tolerating free expression: as Aleh Aheyeu, the deputy chair of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, told me in an email this morning, Kuznechyk’s release, while welcome, came as a surprise to the group “because mass and unprecedented repressions are currently ongoing in Belarus.” And press freedom hardly seems to be the broader goal of Trump’s policy toward Belarus. Aheyeu noted to me that “there is now an alarming tension in the independent media sector in Belarus” due to the gutting of USAID spending. “Many newsrooms are considering options for complete closure, layoffs, forced leave,” Aheyeu said—which could in turn strengthen “pro-Kremlin and Lukashenko propaganda.”
But there is also, of course, an immediate human side to all this, and several advocates I spoke with stressed that Trump deserves credit for getting people out of jail who were suffering, even if the bigger picture is in many ways concerning. Kuznechyk has been reunited with his son, who was only a year old when his father was jailed. “There’s so much happiness that you can’t fully express it,” Kuznechyk said on his release, albeit tempered by the fact that “so many journalists are still in prison.” Capus was present for the reunion, and told me that Kuznechyk is doing well. “He keeps telling me he can’t wait to get back to work. We keep telling him, Catch your breath,” Capus said. “I’m just so grateful for all of the work that the Trump administration and everybody did to bring him home. This is as real as it gets. And a family’s been reunited as a result.”
Other notable stories:
- Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jim Friedlich, the CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, makes the case that in the face of Trump’s escalating threats, US news organizations should club together to form a “NATO for news,” committed to the principle that an attack on one outlet is an attack on all. One possible manifestation of this, Friedlich writes, could be for outlets to boycott White House events until the administration restores access to the Associated Press, which is currently banned for refusing to say “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico” like Trump wants. Writing for CJR, however, the media reporter Paul Farhi argues that a mass walkout would be a mistake since the entire press corps isn’t likely to agree to it and those who boycott could lose valuable access to the briefing room.
- Recently, Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund, a pair of advocacy groups, signed a contract to wrap an ad around the print edition of the Washington Post asking whether Trump or Musk is really running the country. The ad was slated to run today, but in between times, the Post told the two groups that it couldn’t run the ad after all; per Common Cause, the paper was still amenable to running a smaller ad inside the paper, but the groups walked away. Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and CEO of Common Cause, told CNN that the cancellation was concerning, suggesting that it raises “serious questions about the paper’s independence” under billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. (The Post declined to comment.)
- Yesterday, five suspected ISIS jailers went on trial in France, where they stand accused of kidnapping and torturing four French journalists—Didier François, Édouard Elias, Nicolas Hénin, and Pierre Torres—after the reporters entered Syria in 2013. Among the accused is Mehdi Nemmouche, who is already serving a life sentence for an attack on a Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014; Nemmouche denied imprisoning the journalists, but all four have identified him as one of their captors. The four were released shortly before ISIS militants executed the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff in 2014.
- For Nieman Reports, Stefania D’Ignoti checked in with Italian journalists who covered COVID-19 as it began to ravage Europe in February 2020. “Five years have passed since the beginning of the global pandemic, but Italian journalists still struggle to cope with their trauma, PTSD symptoms, and memories that keep haunting them,” she writes. “As some of the first Western reporters on the frontline of a new story no one knew how to cover, many are dismayed to see how fast the world has moved on from a tragic news event that has impacted their mental health forever.”
- And Alissa Quart, the cocreator of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, argues in an essay for CJR that the US needs a working-class media. “After the 2024 election, the punditocracy has seemingly rediscovered the working-class voter for the second time,” Quart writes, in reference to Trump’s first win, in 2016—but on neither occasion “did they ‘rediscover’ the value of working-class journalists.” As the Democratic Party debates how it can better identify with the working class amid the “identity crisis” that has followed its loss, “the media should be similarly realigned.”
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