Reporters Without Borders, founded in France in 1985, defends and promotes freedom of information around the world, while reporting on abuses committed against journalists and all forms of censorship. The group, known by its French acronym RSF, released their 2026 World Press Freedom Index on April 30, which found that for the first time over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom, the lowest scores in 25 years.
The report concludes that journalism is increasingly criminalized around the world, where a growing number of reporters are subject to repression including imprisonment and assassination. The RSF Index highlighted the catastrophic situation in Gaza, where more than 220 Palestinian journalists have been killed by the Israeli Army since October 2023, with at least 70 of them slain while actively engaged in reporting.
The Index on Press Freedom listed the United States as #64 globally, dropping seven places, to an all-time low rating. RSF explicitly cited President Donald Trump’s rhetoric labeling journalists and media outlets he disagrees with as “enemies of the people;” combined with government censorship, defunding of public broadcasters; the weaponization of government agencies to attack his critics and media companies and multiple lawsuits targeting outlets critical of his policies as the single biggest threat to American press freedom today. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Ben Grazda, advocacy manager with Reporters Without Borders, who summarizes the 2026 World Press Freedom Index report focusing on global trends and threats to a free press in the U.S. under Donald Trump.
BEN GRAZDA: For the first time since we’ve started reporting, the average score in all 180 countries that we monitor has never been so low. Over half the countries are in our bottom two categories of difficult or very serious. And just to put that in perspective, this category was only a small minority, about 13 percent in 2002 when we started monitoring. In that same year in 2002, when we started, 20 percent of the global population lived in the country where the state of press freedom was categorized as good, but 25 years later it’s less than 1 percent. So we’ve really seen both the top scores get worse and also more countries fall into those bottom scores.
SCOTT HARRIS: I wondered if you give some examples of the loss of press freedom on the world’s continents. We’re not going to get to all the countries obviously, but I wonder if you’d highlight some of the examples of the criminalization of journalism; repression of reporters and their news outlets; and certainly, the assassination of journalists who offend the powerful. I think one of the worst examples of the repression of journalists is what’s happened in Gaza over the last several years where it really appears there’s quite substantial evidence that Israel and its war in Gaza has targeted journalists for assassination.
BEN GRAZDA: Yeah. And we’ve seen videos with our own eyes of journalists who are literally trying to communicate with people holding cell phones up in one of the few places where they can still get Internet access and just being killed with Israeli bombs. And so it is direct targeting of journalists. Statistically, we’ve seen over 220 journalists that have been killed since Oct. 7, including at least 70 who were killed while doing their work. In addition to the killing of journalists, which is horrific, we’ve seen still an existing blockade against international journalists from entering Gaza. And so you basically have these journalists who are doing the best they can to do their work and being targeted and killed at the same time where the Israeli government is preventing international journalists from entering Gaza. And so we have people in the Middle East who are fighting every day to try to protect journalists in Gaza in Palestine from being attacked, but that is definitely one of the worst situations that we see.
To your point on the legal threats, the legal indicator was actually our worst indicator, which means that there’s a bigger increase in legal threats against journalists between last year and this year. In three out of every five countries, the legal situation for journalists actually got worse and a lot of this is through this defense secrets and national security laws that have been used to target journalists. That obviously happens in Russia, Belarus, the Philippines and India and other places, but we’re also seeing that in the U.S. with raids of journalist homes; subpoenas against journalists; kicking journalists out of the Pentagon because supposedly trying to get classified information when all they’re trying to do is go to the briefing room. So the legal threats against journalists are increasing a lot.
SCOTT HARRIS: Reporters Without borders, World Press Freedom Index found that the United States has fallen 14 points since 2022 when that report was last issued. The same downward trend, the report says, that’s seen in other regions in the world, including Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. I wondered if you give us the top line concern about the erosion of press freedom here in the United States.
BEN GRAZDA: What we see in the U.S. as a threat is Donald Trump and the Trump administration basically trying to control what information people get and they’re using a variety of things to make that happen. So they’re not just strategically cutting off sources of information, but they’re also amplifying sources of disinformation. Trump is attacking journalists. He calls female journalists “Piggy.” He is asking reporters which outlet they’re from and if he doesn’t like that outlet, he’s basically just yelling at their faces. He’s weaponized the FCC into basically a bribery scheme where he’ll threaten the station. The FCC will threaten them with regulation and then maybe force them to settle, which we’ve seen with Paramount and what was happening there with the allegations against CBS. We’ve seen them restricting access, not just in the Pentagon, but kicking the Associated Press out of the newsroom for not using Gulf of America.
They’re trying to limit foreign journalists, how long foreign journalists can stay in the U.S. They’re even deporting journalists that come from migrant communities and that’s having a massive impact on the ability for people that come from Spanish and other migrant communities to get reliable information.
For more information, visit Reporters Without Borders at rsf.org/en.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Ben Grazda (16:28) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. To subscribe to our podcasts, email newsletters, our Trump authoritarian playbook Substack or social media, subscribe here.
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