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By almost any measure, 2025 has been a tough year for anyone who cares about press freedom.
For journalists and media workers, this year may be the deadliest on record. The number of attacks on journalists in the United States is almost equal to that of the past three years combined. The President of the United States has rebuked many of those who asked him questions, calling one woman a “little piggy.” And the pool of people doing this work continues to shrink.
For journalists, it’s hard to imagine a darker time. Many have said so, including former Sen. Tim Richardson. washington post Journalist and current director of the Journalism and Disinformation Project at PEN America. “It’s safe to say that the attacks on the media over the past year have been perhaps the most aggressive we have seen in modern times.”
Tracking killings and attacks on journalists
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 126 media workers had been killed globally in 2025 as of early December, matching the number of deaths in all of 2024 and setting a record last year. Israeli bombing of Gaza kills 85 people, 82 killed Palestinian.
“This is very concerning,” said Judy Ginsburg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Unfortunately, it’s certainly not just the sheer number of journalists and media workers who are killed, but also the failure to get justice or accountability for these killings.
“We know from decades of this work that impunity breeds impunity,” she said. “The failure to address the killings of journalists therefore creates an environment in which these killings continue to occur.”
The committee estimates that at least 323 journalists are imprisoned worldwide.
None of those killed this year were from the United States. But work on American soil remains dangerous. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, there have been 170 reports of attacks on journalists in the United States this year, 160 of which were committed by law enforcement agencies. Many of these stories come from coverage of immigration enforcement efforts.
It’s impossible to ignore the president’s influence Donald TrumpHe is often angry with the media while interacting with reporters more than any president in living memory – often answering their cellphones.
“Trump always attacks the media,” Richardson said. “But in his second term, he turned this into government action to restrict, punish and intimidate journalists.”
Reporters quickly learned they faced a battle
The Associated Press learned of this quickly when Trump restricted the outlet’s coverage of him because it refused to follow his lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico. It launched a court battle that remains unresolved. Trump also received settlements from ABC and CBS News over coverage that he was unhappy with and is suing New York The Times and Wall Street Journal.
Trump and his allies in Congress have long been angry about bias against conservatives in PBS and NPR newscasts and have succeeded in cutting funding for public broadcasting as a whole. The president has also moved to shut down government-run organizations that disseminate news around the world.
“The United States is a major investor in media development, a major investor in independent media organizations in countries with little or no independent media, or a source of information for people in countries without free media,” Ginsburg said. “The removal of Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America is another blow to press freedom around the world.”
Others in his administration have followed Trump’s lead, such as when his press office chose the day after Thanksgiving to launch a portal complaining about unfairness by the media or reporters.
“This is part of an overall strategy that we’re seeing from some governments, especially the United States, to paint any journalist who doesn’t simply (repeat) a government-issued narrative as fake news, as dubious, as dodgy, as criminal,” Ginsburg said.
Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Peter Heggsportraying reporters as dark figures stalking the halls of the Pentagon to expose secrets, as justification for his restrictive rules on reporting.
This led to the most notable example of journalists fighting back: Most mainstream news outlets gave up their qualifications to work at the Pentagon rather than agree to the rules and still report the news while working on the sidelines. The New York Times has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the rules. The paper also publicly defended itself when the president attacked, such as when he complained about his health coverage.
Although the campaign against the media was more organized, the public rarely noticed. Earlier this year, 36% of Americans said they had heard about the Trump administration’s relationship with the media, compared with 72% at the same time during Trump’s first term, the Pew Research Center said.
Polls consistently show that journalists are never popular, and as their jobs become more difficult, they are likely to attract less sympathy.
“In reality, much of this harm falls on the public, who rely on this independent report to understand and scrutinize the decisions being made in the most powerful office in the world,” Richardson said.
Some reasons for optimism
The journalism industry as a whole has experienced more than two decades of austerity, largely caused by the collapse of the advertising market, and every year there are more reports of journalists being laid off as a result. One of the most sobering statistics this year comes from a report by Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News: In 2002, there were 40 journalists per 100,000 people in the United States. This year, that number has dropped to just over 8.
Asked if they could find reasons for optimism, both Ginsburg and Richardson pointed to the rise of a handful of independent local news organizations, with green shoots of growth emerging in the barren landscape of places like The Baltimore Banner, Virginia’s Charlottesville Tomorrow, and Michigan’s Outlier Media.
Despite being ridiculed in Trump’s America, influential Axios CEO Jim VandeHei recently argued in a column that journalists in mainstream media are still hard at work and able to set the national agenda through their reporting.
As he told the AP: “Over time, people will hopefully wake up and say, ‘Hey, the media is imperfect like anything else, but, having a free press is a good thing.'”
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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.