So you want to be a journalist? Getting the story out in an age of press censorship

During the seven years I served as NATO’s Spokesman (1993-2000) I developed a healthy respect for journalists and the press in general. They did not always give me an easy time at our weekly press briefings, especially when they felt that I had not provided them with all the facts or answered their questions fully and clearly enough. Yet I soon came to appreciate that they had their job to do too and that most of their questions – as uncomfortable as they were for me in my role as the representative of an international organisation with both military and operational secrets to keep – were both legitimate and in the public interest.

Indeed, rigorous press scrutiny forced those of us at NATO in the media firing line to react faster and better, and to shake up the bureaucracy to obtain the accurate information we needed to answer press queries adequately. It was all about building trust and gaining credibility by being open and transparent because that was the best way for NATO’s policies and actions to be communicated to the public in a balanced and objective way. In a democracy, it is the job of the free press to hold governments and public officials as I then was to account. We had to develop a thick skin for the inevitable criticism and questioning that this press scrutiny brought with it. But we always operated on the principle that if we couldn’t convince the media of the wisdom of what we were doing, we would not maintain political or public support for long. Media scrutiny forced NATO to constantly re-assess the effectiveness of its strategies and to avoid the risks of groupthink or tunnel vision – and that was no bad thing.

By exposing mistakes and failures, the press helped to improve over time the quality of policy-making and decisions as well as the ability to explain them to the public rationally and convincingly. This process is never perfect in any bureaucracy, of course, but much better than when those bureaucracies are allowed to become complacent, disconnected and to operate in the shadows. “Democracy dies in darkness”, as the motto of The Washington Post reminds us. The English 19th-century political thinker, Jeremy Bentham, famously said that “the price of democracy is eternal vigilance”. There can be no doubt that in the 20th and 21st centuries it is the free press that has largely supplied that vigilance.

I recall those times because the free press that kept NATO on its toes during my stint as Spokesman is precisely what is now under threat – unsurprisingly first and foremost in the world’s authoritarian states, but increasingly, and in more surreptitious ways, in Western democracies too. The precepts of news organisations such as The New York Times or the Financial Times (“All the news fit to print” or “Without fear or favour “) are increasingly becoming the exception rather than the rule.

For decades, Reporters Without Borders has been monitoring press freedom worldwide and its latest annual survey makes for depressing reading. Since 2014, there has been a marked decline in press freedom on all continents. The global average of free media has gone from 67 out of 100, where the United States is judged to be today, to 55 out of 100, the level associated with Serbia. And in Serbia, journalists covering the anti-government demonstrations in the wake of the Novi Sad railway station roof collapse in 2024, and ensuing corruption scandal, have been constantly harassed and even beaten up by the police. In 2025 alone, there were 91 reported physical assaults on journalists in Serbia according to the Independent Journalists Association in Belgrade, and probably still more that went unreported.

Reporters without Borders has found that the conditions for practicing independent journalism have become “difficult” or “very serious” in over half the countries in the world and “satisfactory” in only one in four countries. Other organisations that track the health of democracy around the globe, corruption levels in government and business or press freedom have reached similar conclusions. V-Dem, a Sweden-based research group, estimates that the global average for press freedom has declined from 0.66 (on a scale of 0 to 1.00) in 2004 to 0.49 today. It assesses that this decline takes the average from the level of press freedom currently found in Mexico to that of India where the authoritarian rule of Narendra Modi and his BJP Hindu nationalist party has put the press under increasing pressure to toe the government line. A similar picture applies to the Internet, which is a vital source of news and media reporting which has taken over from newspapers, radio and TV in giving citizens access to information (although not always reliable). Freedom House, a Washington-based institute, reports that Internet freedom has declined for 15 straight years. The cases of total Internet cutoffs have been well reported in recent times, such as during Arab Spring demonstrations in Egypt or the elections in Uganda or during the violent repression of protesters by the theocratic regime in Iran. But there has been more commonly an erosion of Internet freedom across autocracies and democracies (particularly the partial ones) alike. In 2024, 18 countries out of the 74 surveyed by Freedom House were deemed to be “digitally free”. But last year it was only 9 countries.

The main reason for the deterioration in the last 15 years has been more government interference with the Internet. It doesn’t have to be the Chinese Great Firewall, which blocks many western news channels, websites and social media platforms, but can take the form of government manipulation of content. AI is enabling governments and other actors to create fake stories on fake sites dressed up as proper media outlets. Government agents are disguised as professional journalists reporting from the outside rather than the inside. The aim is to shift as much media content in a pro-government direction as possible.

Finally, the independent media is coping with an unprecedented financial crisis. Reporters Without Borders finds that in 160 out of 180 countries surveyed, the media cannot generate sufficient resources to survive by itself. This is partly due to things not directly related to government pressure (as when offended politicians take away cheap postage, tax relief or tax exemptions from media organisations), but clearly the Internet and social media have deprived the traditional media of much of its former revenue from advertising. Moreover, governments have used financial squeezes as an indirect way of bringing the free press to heel. It is easy for governments to bully companies placing advertisements in the media to make them steer clear of certain critical or unfavourable news organisations for fear of losing government contracts or access to ministers and advisors at the centre of power.

By now we are becoming familiar with the panoply of instruments that authoritarian or authoritarian-minded leaders in still surviving democracies like to use to get critical journalists and their editors, media owners and sponsors off their backs. Outright repression and even targeted assassinations are one method calculated to sow fear and intimidate the media into practising self-censorship. In Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai, the media magnate and owner of the late Apple Daily, has just been sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, the harshest punishment yet under Hong Kong’s controversial National Security Law. Lai has also been in prison for five years and his free reporting of the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong was characterised as “treason” and “subversion” and “colluding with foreign powers” to bring down the Chinese government. Six other Apple Daily executives were also sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to ten years.

Further west, Iran has hired assassins to try to kill Iranian journalists operating abroad, such as Masih Alinejad, an advocate of women’s rights, living in New York. Iranian journalists working in London for the BBC Persian Service or the Iran International opposition TV channel (which has set the number of demonstrators killed by Iranian security forces during the protests last January at 36,500) report that they do not feel safe and that their family members are detained and harassed whenever they travel back to Iran. Foreign journalists are still allowed to visit Iran but only if they broadcast their content to foreign audiences and not in Persian language services within Iran itself.

The dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, famously used his air force to hijack a passenger plane en route from Greece to Lithuania to arrest a Belarusian independent journalist, Roman Protasevich, who had fled abroad. Protasevich was immediately thrown into jail and kept there until he had a change of heart and agreed to stop his critical reporting.

Even in the haven of democracy and the rule of law, the EU, being an investigative journalist can be a dangerous business. The Maltese reporter covering corruption, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was blown up in her car in 2017. It was only in 2025 that two men were sentenced in Malta for supplying the bomb. In Slovakia the journalist investigating tax fraud, Ján Kuciak, was gunned down with his fiancée in 2018. Ireland, on both sides of the border, has had its share of incidents too. The investigative reporter, Veronica Guerin, was killed in a contract murder in her car in Dublin in 1996, at the hands of a drug cartel. North of the border in Ulster, the reporter of the Sunday World, Martin O’Hagan, was shot dead by Loyalist paramilitaries in 2001 and the journalist covering the Troubles, Lyra McKee, suffered the same fate when observing a riot in Derry in 2019, with three men being charged for her killing. News crews filming unrest in Belfast and Derry have been frequently targeted by men in balaclavas and need police protection to operate. Indeed, being a journalist is becoming a risky undertaking. According to the International Federation of Journalists, 128 reporters and media representatives were killed in the line of duty in 2025, including 10 women. 44% of the deaths were in Gaza.

Yet the authoritarians and their emulators in democratic states have found more subtle ways to muzzle the free press. President Erdoğan has locked journalists up in record numbers while President Putin keeps foreign financial support for Russia’s dwindling free newspapers, radio stations and NGOs out by brandishing those media as “foreign agents” and thus suspect in the eyes of the Russian population. Most of that remaining independent media has relocated abroad, like TV Rain to the Netherlands or Novaya Gazeta to Latvia, making it difficult to reach a broad Russian audience. In recent days, Russia had limited access to the Telegram platform which was up to now still relatively free in the country and used by Russian news agencies, like Medusa operating in Lithuania, to distribute content inside Russia to an estimated 12 million users. Even though the restrictions on Telegram are hurting Moscow’s military operations in Ukraine, the Kremlin still thinks the effort is worthwhile to close Russians off even more from the outside world. Putin has also used a technique much favoured by populist leaders in the West like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Donald Trump in the US, which is to encourage their business friends and partners to take over media companies and then eviscerate them from within. This happened in Russia when Gazprom acquired NTV and TNT from Lukoil along with several radio stations and the VK social media platform. But it has also happened in the US with Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, taking over the Washington Post. In the last presidential election, Bezos would not allow the Post’s editorial board to endorse Kamala Harris for President in contrast to the usual practice of US newspapers choosing their preferred candidate. As a result, several members of the editorial board resigned. Last week, the Post’s Chief Executive, Will Lewis, fired a third of the Post’s employees and shut down all the Post’s foreign bureaus in an effort to refocus this once great national newspaper on local Washington issues and lifestyle features. As the Post swung to the right, and subscribers left in droves, it lost its profitability and its financial crisis only deepened. The newspaper, once famous for Woodward and Bernstein and the exposure of the Watergate scandal, is today a shadow of its former influential self.

Donald Trump has drawn freely from this playbook. He regularly insults and berates reporters for asking normal and routine questions, which seasoned politicians would take in their stride, and even accuses journalists of lacking patriotism. Trump has a particular aversion to female journalists, unfortunately part of a more universal trend. The Economist has quoted a study by UNESCO that found that 75% of the female journalists it surveyed had been the victims of online abuse, and 42% had experienced harassment or threats of physical violence in person.

Trump has re-engineered the White House press corps to give a smaller role to the traditional networks and national newspapers and to bring in more MAGA-sympathetic niche media outlets on the Internet and social media. The Associated Press was even excluded from White House press briefings because it refused to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Trump has consistently labelled any coverage that is not slavishly loyal to him as “fake news” and castigated whole sections of the US media as “enemies of the people”. He has called reporting by the New York Times “seditious” and even “treasonous” and views critical media stories as an insult to the country and to the dignity of the office of the President. The White House press office has produced a “naughty list” of so-called media offenders that it deems guilty of “lying”, “left wing lunacy” and a lack of professionalism. Yet Trump’s preferred instrument of pressure is litigation and to try to tie his media critics up in endless, potentially ruinous, multi-billion-dollar lawsuits. Thus far he has started proceedings against The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC, CNN and even the BBC, notably not a US network.

In the case of the BBC, this was because the documentary programme, Panorama, unfortunately spliced together two separate parts of Trump’s speech to his MAGA supporters just before they stormed the US Congress on January 6, 2021. This Panorama programme was not broadcast in the US and overall was not especially critical of Trump, trying more to explain the viewpoints of his MAGA supporters. The BBC apologised for its mistake and its Director General and Director of News both resigned. Normally this should have been enough for the US President to declare victory, but not Donald Trump. He has insisted on pursuing the BBC for billions in damages in a Florida court.

Trump may not win his lawsuits against the media. The US has robust right of free speech and freedom of information laws. But that is not the point. Where the media is owned by larger corporations, the latter have preferred to settle out of court to keep Trump and his administration’s favour in light of upcoming merger talks or business deals. This was notably the case with Paramount Global that paid Trump $16mn in July 2025 after its affiliate CBS made a mistake in editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris.

Yet beyond financial gain, what Trump is really after is undermining the credibility of the media with US public opinion. Throw enough mud and some of it sticks. The environment for the US media to operate in has been fairly hostile for years, especially when they show up at Republican campaign rallies. A recent Gallup poll shows that only 8% of Republicans trust the mainstream media, down from 33% in 2007, in the pre-dawn social media era when anger and the politics of raw emotion were still in their infancy. A core function of the mainstream media is to establish the facts and a social consensus around those facts. It is on this basis that societies can evolve, allowing a collective diagnosis of the problems and an open, rational debate on the feasibility and merits of all the solutions that politicians propose. Denigrating the media and demonising its role is thus the first step towards dictatorship in which, as in George Orwell’s 1984, the clock strikes 13, truth is lies and 2+2 =5. A world in which the only opinions that count are the ones that are shouted the loudest and people are condemned to live in bubbles of invented reality and ignorance.

Trump’s campaign against the media in the world’s most powerful democracy is not only having an impact inside the United States but also making it harder for free media to survive elsewhere. US foreign aid cuts have decimated the training of journalists, the detection and countering of propaganda and disinformation and support to NGOs monitoring media freedoms in places as diverse as Moldova, Bosnia and Georgia. As in so many other areas of international relations, the US makes the weather, and its examples (for good and bad) are soon emulated. Authoritarian governments and oligarchs have rushed into the breach to curtail their media. They have taken journalists to court to reveal their sources or used Pegasus spyware supplied by Israel to bug the phones of journalists. This sends a message to potential whistleblowers and those leaking to the press that they can be unmasked and prosecuted. In a 2011 scandal, it was revealed that this Pegasus software has been secretly procured and used by some governments in Central and Eastern Europe too, notably the former PiS led government in Poland and Hungary. In 2023, Pegasus spyware was also used to snoop on members of the European Parliament.

From Argentina to Azerbaijan and from Türkiye to India, leaders have taken a cue from Trump to clamp down at home and force journalists into exile. Türkiye seized Can Holding, a business empire that owns many TV stations, and charged it with tax evasion and money laundering. Leaders elsewhere have used louder Trumpian rhetoric against the media and even castigated it as “pure terrorism”, to use the phrase of Serbia’s Alexander Vučić. Plutocrats and oligarchs have been emboldened too, launching civilian lawsuits against journalists and media organisations of vexatious character to intimidate and silence them. In 2023, there were more than 800 such lawsuits to obtain gagging orders in Europe alone. As media bosses become more cautious, think of all the investigations that are not carried out, the documentaries pulled before they can be broadcast and the stories that are researched but never written.

Even in mature and free democracies, journalists are not the most popular of people. In public attitudes, they often rank just behind politicians and slightly ahead of second-hand car salesmen. The media organisations they work for often don’t help themselves either. When they make mistakes, their detractors seize upon them to denounce how the media work, demand more privacy, less media intrusion and more government control and press regulation. This was the case after the BBC Panorama documentary. Some critics of the BBC (for paying too much attention to Gaza and the plight of the Palestinians) even argued that the BBC should stop doing news and limit itself to making entertainment programmes like the highly popular Traitors series. A much more serious press scandal has occupied the UK for years connected to the illegal practice of newspapers to hire private detectives to hack into the phones of members of the Royal Family and celebrities in order to find stories. This heinous practice even extended to dead schoolchildren. Prince Harry and numerous actors and politicians have periodically turned up in the High Court in London to seek redress from the newspapers for invasions of their privacy and they have condemned the media’s interest in their lives with high moral outrage. At the same time, as public figures, they have used the same media to publicise their views and their charitable and social activities. The UK phone hacking scandal led to a government inquiry into press behaviour and to the closure of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. So not every journalist is a crusading hero for truth and progress in human affairs. Yet at least the phone hacking scandal led to a much-needed debate about privacy versus the public interest, particularly when individuals have a public role and responsibility, and about legal and illegal ways for the media to obtain and publish information from its multiple sources.

Yet we still owe the free press a great debt.

How else would Americans have discovered the crimes of Richard Nixon and his cover-up attempts during the Watergate scandal? How else would we be aware of the Panama Papers, which revealed the efforts of wealthy Europeans and Americans to dodge taxes and hide their wealth in illegal tax havens? How else would drug companies be exposed for marketing contaminated products to pregnant mothers? And how else would we have insight into the Jeffrey Epstein files to understand how the rich, famous and powerful benefited from their relationship with him? This is an essential step in ensuring justice for Epstein’s many female victims. Finally, how else would we know what is happening on the ground in the many conflicts, natural disasters and human rights abuses around the world which enable us to emphasise and connect with our fellow human beings? In sum, if the free media doesn’t help us to make sense of this turbulent and complex world we are living in, who else is going to do that for us?

These arguments may appear abstract for many European citizens as they struggle with the cost of living and the daily struggle to get through life. After all, one can live without needing to be a news junkie or worry too much about not knowing what is going on around us or why ultimately it matters. Being told that a free press is an essential pillar of a healthy democracy along with free and fair elections and an independent judiciary does not necessarily make it evident from one day to the next. As with many other attributes of democracy, we are unlikely to notice a free press until we no longer have it.

Yet there is one argument that should resonate with the average European citizen and that is the relationship between a free press and low levels of corruption in public life and business. Academic research shows overwhelming data that there is a direct correlation between muzzling the press and increasing levels of corruption. The Sweden-based organisation, V-Dem, has studied 80 years of data from 180 countries to demonstrate that where the free media is restricted, graft and corruption rise progressively. This week Berlin-based Transparency International has sharply downgraded its rating of the US on its Corruption Index to 64 out of 100, explicitly citing curbs on media, the rule of law and individual freedoms.

Clamping down on the press is invariably a reliable warning sign of what comes next. This takes the form of bribes and kickbacks, sweetheart deals to friends and political loyalists, elites gaining monopolies, absence of legal accountability and leaders shutting down investigations into conflicts of interest and abuses of power for financial gain. It is always the prosperity and potentially the safety of the average citizen that suffers when technology is misused to extract sensitive data, or when they must buy sub-standard goods due to the lack of competition or quality control. A free press is no guarantee that such corruption will never happen; but it is the best thing we have discovered so far to expose abuses and thus serve as a deterrent against their repeated use.

The decline of the free press worldwide has reached a stage that now requires action from the EU and its member states. They cannot do much to prevent efforts to undermine the press beyond their borders but at least they can give maximum publicity to abuses in other countries and highlight the plight of individual journalists and news organisations. Press freedom needs to be embedded in EU policy on human rights. Reporters under pressure need to know that they are not abandoned and that their cases are being addressed in EU diplomatic channels with other countries – Jimmy Lai is a case in point. Media attention and diplomatic intervention did not stop the Chinese judges from sentencing Lai to 20 years in prison. But the attention underscored the hollowness and trumped-up character of the charges against him (“foreign conspiracy”) and the repression of the independent media in Hong Kong and elsewhere in China. Silence would not have changed Lai’s sentence but made it even easier for Beijing to clamp down in the shadows.

As the US withdraws from assisting media organisations across the globe, the EU must identify where it can step in and support them, for instance Radio Free Europe, which broadcasts to the Western Balkans and the Caucasus and Central Asia. It must also help media in exile from Russia, Belarus, Iran and the Caucasus to survive and to continue to broadcast to their audiences back in these regions, as well as protect, to the extent possible, vulnerable reporters from intimidation and physical harm. For instance, by focusing intelligence resources on threats to them.

Within the EU, member states need to tighten up laws preventing monopoly ownership of media (Silvio Berlusconi used to control all the Italian TV stations, both public and private), to strengthen public broadcasting and reinforce rules against political interference in publicly owned national TV and radio. Moreover, courts must be given robust powers to uphold freedom of investigation and reporting and prevent libel and slander laws from being drafted so broadly that they can be easily abused by politicians, oligarchs and celebrities to muzzle any reporting that they deem embarrassing or which will reveal corruption or questionable practices.

The EU needs to look closely too at the ownership structures of the press and intervene where private takeovers of media organisations or micro-management of editorial content from over-zealous owners or their business representatives could undermine press diversity and the public interest. In this vein, the EU could also financially support the creation of new news outlets or regional TV, radio and print, for instance through tax incentives, including property and equipment, VAT rates or subsidies. Incentives to secure the independence of public broadcasting and adequate resources to cover the news comprehensively (particularly for European journalists operating in difficult environments like Russia, China or conflict zones) should also be on the agenda. The annual licence fee that BBC viewers pay in the UK (and which avoids the Corporation having to use back-to-back advertising or make only cheap, race-to-the-bottom programmes) could perhaps be applied within EU member states as well to achieve a better quality of public broadcasting. The EU could also publish an annual report on the state of press freedom within the member states, which would point candidly to instances where governments have used overt or more surreptitious methods to control the media and prevent it from doing its job properly.

It is not the role of the media to be loved but it is certainly the test of a healthy democracy that its politicians and officials are able to operate without feeling the constant need to make the media a scapegoat and try to shut it down. A degree of permanent tension between politicians, elites and the media, yet one still grounded in a mutual respect for the job that each must do, is the hallmark of political systems that genuinely serve the needs and interests of the electorate. Many years ago, the Elysée correspondent of the French satirical newspaper, Le Canard enchaîné, was fired by the newspaper’s editor after he received the Légion d’honneur from then French president, Charles de Gaulle. When the correspondent called the editor to complain about his sacking over the award of a medal, he received the reply: “you should never have deserved this”. Now that’s the sign of a healthy democracy and a good lesson in the ethics of a free press for any aspiring journalist.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.