Freedom of the Press Explained

What Is Freedom of the Press

Freedom of the press is the right to report and publish news without government interference. It protects criticism of the government and stops officials from blocking stories, punishing reporters, or shutting down news outlets. The right belongs to everyone, not only to people who work in newsrooms.

Three legal protections carry most of the weight, and all three are older than anyone reading this page. In 1971 the Nixon administration tried to stop The New York Times from publishing classified documents about Vietnam, and the Supreme Court refused to let it. That case established that the government almost never gets to block a story before it runs, a bar known as prior restraint.

The second protection makes it hard for officials to win libel suits. Since 1964, a public official suing for defamation has had to prove the journalist knew the claim was false or did not care whether it was, a test called actual malice.

The third protection is the weakest, because it is not federal. Forty states and the District of Columbia have shield laws that let reporters refuse to name a confidential source, and most of the rest offer some protection through court rulings, but Wyoming has neither. There is no federal shield law at all.

America Now Ranks 64th in Press Freedom

The whole decline is on the record, year by year. Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 49th in 2015. The president began calling journalists “enemies of the people” in 2017, and by 2020 police and federal agents had arrested a record 147 journalists in a single year. The ranking fell to 55th in 2024, Congress cut $1.1 billion from public media in 2025, and the 2026 Index put the country at 64th.

Each step down came from a separate documented decision, and every one of them was legal.

1. 2015 Ranked 49th of 180
2. 2017 Press called "enemy of the American People"
3. 2020 147 journalists arrested, a record
4. 2024 Ranking falls to 55th
5. 2025 Congress cuts $1.1B from public media
6. 2026 Ranking falls to 64th, worst ever

Sources: Reporters Without Borders; U.S. Press Freedom Tracker; NPR.

: 2015 — Ranked 49th of 180. 2017 — Press called "enemy of the American People". 2020 — 147 journalists arrested, a record. 2024 — Ranking falls to 55th. 2025 — Congress cuts $1.1B from public media. 2026 — Ranking falls to 64th, worst ever.

2015: RSF ranked the United States 49th out of 180 countries. The country had already slipped from 17th when the Index began in 2002.

2017: In February the president called the news media “the enemy of the American People,” a phrase he has used about reporters ever since.

2020: The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker logged 147 arrests or criminal charges against journalists, most of them at protests after the police killing of George Floyd. That single year accounts for about a third of every arrest the Tracker has ever recorded.

2024: The ranking dropped about 10 places in a single year, to 55th. It slipped two more places in 2025, to 57th.

2025: In July, Congress rescinded $1.1 billion that had already been appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the agency that funded NPR and PBS member stations. CPB announced it would close.

2026: The Index dropped the country seven more places to 64th, its lowest position in the 25 years RSF has published the ranking.

The ranking has fallen further in the last two years than it did in the whole decade before them.

World Press Freedom Index ranking

Period	Value
2015	49th
2026	64th
Change	-15 places

A ranking only means something next to the countries the United States normally measures itself against. On press freedom, that comparison no longer flatters it.

Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Australia all score higher than the United States, and none of them is close to it.

Every peer democracy scores higher than the United States

Category	Value
Germany (14th)	82.17
United Kingdom (18th)	78.95
France (25th)	77.35
Canada (26th)	77.54
Australia (29th)	74.58
United States (64th)	62.61

2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index scores, where 100 is best. Source: Reporters Without Borders.

RSF builds that score out of things that happen to named reporters on specific days.

The American entry for the last two years names a wire service, a late-night host, a Pentagon press corps, and two reporters who were indicted.

How the Government Is Attacking the Press

The pressure runs on four tracks at once, and each track is an ordinary government power used in a new way.

Billion-Dollar Lawsuits Against Newsrooms

Five of the largest news organizations in the world are defending themselves against the president personally. The combined demand is $55 billion. Two have already settled and paid.

The two suits that ended in payments were filed before the 2024 election. The three still alive were all filed after Trump returned to office.

You do not need to win a $10 billion lawsuit to silence a newsroom. You need to file one, because the defense costs money whether or not the claim survives. A judge threw out the Wall Street Journal suit in April 2026 and Trump refiled it a month later, which bought the paper nothing except another round of legal bills.

Courts have also pushed back hard on the weakest cases. A federal judge dismissed Trump Media’s $3.8 billion suit against The Washington Post in July 2026, ruling the company had produced no evidence the Post published anything with actual malice.

The FCC Threatened Broadcast Licenses

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has used the agency’s licensing power to pressure broadcasters over coverage. He reopened an investigation into “60 Minutes” in January 2025 while Trump’s lawsuit against CBS was pending, and in March 2026 he warned broadcasters that outlets “running hoaxes and news distortions” about the Iran war could lose their licenses at renewal.

CBS changed before the FCC took any formal action. Bill Owens, the longtime executive producer of “60 Minutes,” resigned in April 2025 saying he no longer had the independence to run the program, and correspondent Scott Pelley told viewers that “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways.”

ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel in September 2025 after Carr said Disney could “do this the easy way or the hard way.” Kimmel was back on air within a week, but two station groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, kept his show off their ABC affiliates for several more days. CBS had already announced in July 2025 that it would end “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert, which aired its last episode on May 21, 2026.

Arrests, Raids, and Criminal Threats

Federal agents arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon in Beverly Hills, California on January 29, 2026. A grand jury had indicted him and independent journalist Georgia Fort over their livestream of an anti-ICE protest that interrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. The charges include conspiracy against the right to religious freedom, and prosecutors argued the two were participants rather than reporters.

The FBI searched the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson on January 14, 2026 and seized six devices, including her phone, her work computer, her personal laptop, and her smartwatch. A magistrate judge later barred the government from reviewing any of it without a further court order.

Immigration enforcement has become its own press freedom problem. ICE arrested Salvadoran reporter Mario Guevara on June 14, 2025 while he livestreamed a protest outside Atlanta, held him for nearly four months, and deported him to El Salvador. Colombian reporter Estefany Rodríguez was detained in Nashville on March 4, 2026, the day after she covered four immigration arrests, and released 15 days later.

On April 6, 2026, the president threatened to jail journalists who would not identify their sources for reporting on a rescue mission in Iran. His words were “National security. Give it up or go to jail.”

The White House Banned the AP

The Associated Press was barred from the White House press pool in February 2025 because it kept writing “Gulf of Mexico” instead of “Gulf of America.” A trial judge ordered the administration to restore access, but a federal appeals court ruled 2-1 that the White House may keep the AP out of the Oval Office and other small spaces while the case proceeds.

The Pentagon went further. Reporters were told to sign rules letting the department approve what they published, even unclassified material, and warning that credentials could be pulled from anyone judged a security risk. More than 30 outlets refused and handed back their badges in October 2025, including Fox News and Newsmax alongside the AP, Reuters, and The New York Times. A federal judge ruled in April 2026 that a revised version of the policy still violated his order.

Foreign correspondents lost ground too. DHS published a final rule on July 16, 2026 capping foreign journalists at 240 days in the country, and Chinese nationals at 90, with renewal conditioned on a fresh security review. The rule takes effect September 15, 2026 and is being challenged in court.

Records Requests Hit a 15-Year Low

Public records law puts the same power in ordinary hands. Anyone can request a federal record under the Freedom of Information Act, which is how a lot of local reporting on budgets, police, and contracts starts.

That system is failing. Agencies processed a record 1.6 million requests in fiscal 2025 and released documents in part or in full 47% of the time, the lowest rate since at least 2010. The law requires an answer in 20 business days, and people with pending requests waited more than 240 days on average.

The backlog reached nearly 340,000 overdue requests, and some of the shrinking is bookkeeping rather than progress. USCIS closed 41,918 immigration records requests over three months in 2025 for small errors in the paperwork, nearly eight times as many as it closed that way a year earlier. An agency whistleblower told Congress the closures were designed to look like compliance with a court order.

The Local News Collapse

Local news is disappearing faster than at any point in American history. Nearly 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005, about 40% of everything the country had.

Almost 80% of the counties with no news outlet at all are rural, by the USDA classification Medill uses.

Counties with no local news outlet

Period	Value
2005	150
2025	213
Change	+63 counties

The counties left behind are mostly rural and poor. Another 1,524 counties are down to one remaining source of local news, and roughly 50 million Americans have limited or no access to reporting about the place they live.

Most of the papers that vanished were small and independently owned, which means family publishers gave up before chains did. Medill’s watch list names 250 more counties with a 40% chance of losing their last outlet within a decade.

Ownership explains part of what happens to the ones that survive. Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund, became the second-largest newspaper publisher in the country after buying Tribune Publishing in 2021, and it kept buying through 2025, when its MediaNews Group added the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and six other North Bay titles. In September 2025 DallasNews Corporation shareholders voted overwhelmingly to sell to Hearst rather than to Alden.

What Communities Lose Without Local News

Researchers have measured what happens after a closure in different places, using different methods.

When the local paper closes, the cost turns up in public budgets and court dockets within a few years.

The same pattern is visible one level up, in the measures political scientists use to grade whole countries. The V-Dem Institute’s 2026 report counts 44 countries moving toward autocracy and named the United States among the ten newest, calling its decline “unprecedented” for a wealthy democracy. Freedom House logged a 20th consecutive year of falling global freedom, with media freedom the single worst-hit category over two decades.

RSF, Freedom House, and V-Dem measure different things, and all three now put the United States on the same trajectory.

How to Exercise Your Press Freedom

Every right on this page already belongs to you, and none of them requires a press pass.

File a public records request. The Freedom of Information Act gives you the right to ask any federal agency for its records, and MuckRock files and tracks the request for free. Most agencies will blow the 20-day deadline. File anyway, because the request itself becomes a record and a missed deadline is grounds for a lawsuit.

Attend a public meeting. City council, school board, and county commission meetings are legally open, and they are where zoning, budgets, policing, and school decisions get made. In a county with no reporter left, the only person in the room who does not work for the government may be you.

Subscribe to your local newspaper or public radio station. The papers that closed did not close because nobody read them, but because too few people paid. A subscription funds the specific reporter who sits through those meetings.

Read the outlets the government tries to shut out. The AP was pulled from the Oval Office. Pentagon correspondents were told to sign rules that could brand them security risks. Access gets restricted around subjects officials would rather not see covered, which makes those outlets worth reading first.

The Authoritarian Playbook

RSF calls Hungary’s Viktor Orbán a “press freedom predator” who built a media empire loyal to his party without imprisoning or killing a single journalist. He packed the media regulator with allies, moved roughly 500 outlets into a pro-government foundation, steered about 90% of state advertising to friendly media, and used lawsuits to drain the rest.

Every warning sign documented in Hungary, Russia, and the Philippines now has an American counterpart.

Legal scholars at NYU call the method “autocratic legalism,” meaning the use of ordinary law to dismantle checks while the forms of democracy stay in place. It needs no censorship office and no state broadcaster. It needs lawsuits, a regulator, a budget line, and enough fear that editors start trimming stories on their own.

The Honest Disagreement

Serious people disagree about how much legal protection the press should get. Two of those arguments deserve to be stated in the terms their own side uses.

The first is about the libel standard. Justice Clarence Thomas has written that New York Times v. Sullivan and the cases built on it were “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law,” and that the actual malice test “bears no relation to the text, history or structure of the Constitution.” Justice Neil Gorsuch makes a different argument, that the 1964 media landscape the rule was written for no longer exists.

They have not persuaded their colleagues. On June 29, 2026 the Supreme Court declined 7-2 to hear Alan Dershowitz’s defamation suit against CNN, with Thomas and Gorsuch the only votes to take it. News organizations and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argue the standard has to stay because without it, an official with money could bankrupt a critic through litigation regardless of who eventually won.

The second argument is about accountability, and it has real examples behind it. ABC settled with Trump because George Stephanopoulos said on air that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape” when the jury had found him liable for sexual abuse, a distinction that matters under New York law. Some of these suits rest on genuine errors, and a page arguing that the press should be free to report has to say so.

The two arguments meet at a real tradeoff. A standard loose enough to punish real mistakes is also loose enough to punish accurate reporting, and a standard strict enough to protect accurate reporting also shelters some sloppy work. We do not declare a winner on that.

Not All Media Is Journalism

Press freedom is not freedom from criticism. The First Amendment stops the government from suppressing the press. It does not protect journalists from being wrong, biased, or publicly hammered for it. Readers can criticize, boycott, and cancel subscriptions, and none of that is a press freedom problem.

Not every media outlet practices journalism. Opinion shows, partisan commentary, and entertainment are protected speech, but they are not reporting. Journalism verifies before publishing, names sources when it can, and corrects errors in public. The distinction matters because attacks on press freedom usually borrow legitimate frustration with media quality as their justification.

Libel law still applies. A public official can win a defamation case by showing the reporting was false and published with actual malice. The bar is high because officials would otherwise sue every critic, but false reporting does carry legal consequences.

Shield laws protect sources, not lawbreakers. They let a reporter refuse to name a confidential source, which is what lets a civil servant report waste or abuse without losing a career. On July 2, 2026 the Supreme Court refused to halt $800-a-day contempt fines against former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge for protecting a source, with only Justice Brett Kavanaugh voting to grant relief. No federal shield law exists to stop that.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to arrest a journalist for reporting? Generally no, because the First Amendment protects newsgathering. Courts have allowed arrests when a journalist is charged with something separate, like trespassing or refusing a police order at a protest. About 90% of the journalists arrested in 2025 were never charged, or the charges were later dropped.

Do press freedom protections cover independent journalists and bloggers? Yes. The First Amendment protects the act of publishing, not a profession, so it covers freelancers, newsletter writers, and people livestreaming a protest on a phone. State shield laws are narrower and some define “journalist” in ways that can exclude independent reporters, which is why the definition in any shield bill matters.

Can a police officer stop you from recording in public? No. Federal appeals courts across the country have held that people may record police performing their duties in public, though officers can enforce reasonable limits on where you stand. Refusing to leave after a lawful dispersal order is a separate offense, and that is the charge most arrested journalists face.

How would a federal shield law differ from a state one? State shield laws only bind state courts and state prosecutors, so a federal subpoena or a federal grand jury goes right around them. The PRESS Act, S. 4446, would extend source protection to federal cases. It was introduced in December 2025 and has not moved out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

What you can do

1. Subscribe to a local newsroom. Pick the outlet that covers your city council or county commission and pay for it. If your county is one of the 213 with no outlet left, fund the nearest regional investigative newsroom instead.
2. Ask your senators to move the PRESS Act. S. 4446 would create the federal shield law that would have protected Catherine Herridge. It has sat in the Senate Judiciary Committee since December 2025, so the ask is a committee vote, not a floor speech.
3. File a records request. Use MuckRock to send a FOIA or state public records request about something in your own city, like police overtime or a development deal. Agencies grant fewer than half of them, and unanswered requests are what advocates use to prove the system is broken.
4. Fund the groups that defend reporters. The Freedom of the Press Foundation runs the arrest tracker cited on this page. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press supplies the lawyers. The Committee to Protect Journalists documents cases abroad and now at home.
5. Find out who owns your local outlets. Free Press tracks media consolidation and OpenSecrets tracks who funds the politics around it. Knowing whether a hedge fund owns your paper tells you what to expect from it next.