Trump's America ranks 57th in the world
and the US is dragging global press freedom down with it
On Saturday, Sovereignty overtook Journalism down the stretch to win the 151st Kentucky Derby. Poetically Saturday was also World Press Freedom Day.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released their annual world press freedom index, in which the United States now ranks 57th in the world. In a little over 3 months, the current administration has already contributed to America’s decline in the rankings (down 2 spots so far) and is on course to deliberately further limit press freedom at home and abroad going forward.
According to RSF’s analysis, the global average score has reached a new low and indicated the potentially surprising reason why is economics.
The data measured by the RSF Index’s economic indicator clearly shows that today’s news media are caught between preserving their editorial independence and ensuring their economic survival..
Although physical attacks against journalists are the most visible violations of press freedom, economic pressure is also a major, more insidious problem..
As a result, the global state of press freedom is now classified as a “difficult situation” for the first time in the history of the Index.
Increasingly news media outlets are facing mounting pressure from financiers and advertisers, public aid is shrinking and mergers & acquisitions are diminishing the playing field. This troubling societal development tragically cannot be decoupled from the ever exponential rise of information distributed across social media and search engines. The carnage, beyond actual human journalists, could very well be large swaths of local and global culture.
In mid-March, Trump signed an executive order gutting the US Agency for Global Media. The loss of funding “affected several newsrooms — including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — and, as a result, over 400 million citizens worldwide were suddenly deprived of access to reliable information. Similarly, the freeze on funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) halted US international aid, throwing hundreds of news outlets into a critical state of economic instability and forcing some to shut down.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a global nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting press freedom, has gone so far as to say “press freedom is no longer a given in the United States.”
Since the presidential election last November until March 7 of this year, CPJ has provided safety consultations to more than 530 journalists working in the country. This figure was only 20 in all of 2022, marking an exponential increase in the need for safety information.
We all likely recall that the Associated Press (AP) was banned from the White House for committing the “unpatriotic” offense of not referring to the Gulf of America by its new name. That followed ABC News settling Trump’s defamation lawsuit for $16 million, and now Paramount Global (parent company of CBS News) is considering settling its $2 billion dollar lawsuit with Trump for their “deceptive editing” of an interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris that Trump’s legal team claims was tantamount to “election interference.”
In February, Trump purged members of the board and the staff at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and installed himself as its new chairman. And on Friday, this administration continued swinging its cultural sledgehammer by canceling grants from the largest arts funder in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In emails shared with NPR, which receives two of those grants:
The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.
Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.
This follows a federal judge’s ruling in early April denying the “the National Endowment for the Arts from barring funds to artists whose projects promote gender ideology.” Upon entering the White House, the second Trump administration was very clear and deliberate when they excised any and all federal programs that promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or “gender ideology.” Now Trump has gone one step further by removing their funding.
Also on Friday, the President proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And if that wasn’t enough, Trump signed an executive order ending what he labels as the “subsidization of biased media” effectively neutering government support for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).
And while many Americans celebrated Star Wars on May 4th, the President posted:
Today it was announced that One America News Network, a deceitful purveyor of the Stop the Steal disinformation campaign and January 6th conspiracies, will now publish news through the federally funded Voice of America (VOA), which was established during WWII to combat Nazi disinformation. For decades, VOA reached hundreds of millions around the world with what it firmly believed was objective news and information to cut through political propaganda.
As the president posted, we are indeed experiencing a national security threat.