Press freedom group warns a Trump victory could embolden attacks on journalists

Next month’s presidential election could make America’s hostile media climate even worse for journalists. And it’s not just Americans who have something at stake: Reporters in other countries are watching the United States with apprehension.

That’s the takeaway from a new Committee to Protect Journalists report about the state of press freedom in the US.

“Media workers are confronting challenges that include an increased risk of violence, arrest, on- and offline harassment, legal battles, and criminalization,” said Katherine Jacobsen, the report’s author.

Her research pointed to other causes for concern, like political polarization, “a lack of police accountability for their treatment of journalists,” and the legacy of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Freelance photojournalist Amanda Andrade-Rhoades, who was on assignment at the Capitol for The Washington Post, told Jacobsen that “January 6th was a warning shot.”

“It was a wakeup call to the fragility of our democracy and trust in institutions – like journalism, like the government – that’s been eroding for a very long time,” she said.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has historically called attention to journalists being arrested and killed in repressive regimes. The presidency of Donald Trump – with its “enemy of the people” rhetoric and destabilizing actions against the press – caused the nonprofit group’s leaders to look inward.

While the Biden administration “has tried to restore an air of normalcy around media freedom,” Jacobsen wrote in Tuesday’s report, Trump-era “hatred of the press” has “gone unchecked in much of the country” and continues to have deleterious effects.

According to the US Press Freedom Tracker, assaults on journalists in the US have soared by more than 50% in 2024 compared to last year.

On the campaign trail this year, Trump has “threatened to further his anti-press agenda,” including by asserting that NBC’s parent company Comcast should be investigated for treason, the report stated.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said the “corrosive political environment” has intensified safety concerns for journalists – forcing newsrooms to conduct safety assessments, evaluate online threats, and hire extra security. “It’s a pressure cooker unlike anything we’ve seen in modern American journalism,” Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, told Jacobsen.

Some of the reporters Jacobsen interviewed said, “they feel as though they are operating in a different reality from their readers; that the ‘alternative facts’ of the Trump years have spun entirely different narratives about current events, including the upcoming election.”

Jacobsen added that “the next person in the White House could determine whether independent media function as a cornerstone of U.S. democracy – including holding politicians accountable by fact-checking their claims and following up on their promises – or whether journalists will be at increasing risk from a fresh siege of legal and verbal attacks.”

The outcome could have serious impacts on press freedom well beyond America’s borders. “Overseas,” Jacobsen writes, “journalists fear that a second Trump term would again embolden foreign leaders to restrict their own media, negatively affecting the global press freedom landscape and undermining those in regions that rely on U.S. aid and support.”

The committee’s CEO, Jodie Ginsberg, wrote to both Trump and the Democratic party’s nominee, Kamala Harris, and asked the candidates to “publicly affirm the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment and abide by basic principles to respect and promote media freedom at home and abroad.” Neither candidate has committed to the pledge yet, according to the group.