How President Trump is undermining press freedom around the world

[Commentary] Global press freedom has long been in decline and is now at its lowest point in the past 13 years, according to Freedom House’s latest assessment. What is new, and especially disquieting, are the mounting pressures on the media in the United States, including sharp attacks on reporters by the Trump administration. This raises the question of whether America will continue to serve as a model for other countries.

The United States remains an oasis, one of the few places in the world where aggressive journalistic investigation can be practiced with few legal restrictions and little physical danger to reporters. But even here, press freedom has been weakening for some time, well before the inauguration of Donald Trump. Since Trump’s rise to the presidency, however, matters have taken a turn for the worse. The new White House derides and belittles journalists and media organizations in the hope of undermining the credibility of the press. In so doing, the administration is aggressively promoting the notion that nuance and facts are irrelevant — a staple concept of Russian information warfare.

[Michael Arbramowitz is the president of Freedom House. Arch Puddington is a distinguished fellow for democracy studies at Freedom House.]