State Department Official: Remarks on New Strategies in Defense of Global Press Freedoms

But even though it is an incredibly exciting time to be a journalist, it is also an incredibly challenging time. In fact, I think the challenges to journalism now are deeper and more profound and more disturbing than also any time in our lifetime. And I’m going to talk about basically three big challenges: There’s the journalism safety, there’s the challenge of the shrinking of the freedom of speech space, and then there’s the rise of disinformation.

In the matter of the shrinking of the freedom of speech space, the thing that I’ve seen since I’ve been in government is so many of this rise of countries with autocratic leadership have realized that, in fact, you can shrink and narrow that freedom of speech space; that everything that we believed about the rise of the Internet, that it was like air and this incredible, never-ending supply of information -- countries are realizing that they can crack down on that. They can erect firewalls, they can pass criminal defamation laws, they can pass restrictive non-governmental organization laws. All of those things begin to restrict that freedom of speech space, which already is different than it is in the US. So my big boss President Barack Obama, as well as my day-to-day boss Secretary of State John Kerry, has made it very clear that supporting freedom of the press is a critical element of US foreign policy.