🌊 Has the US Lost Freedom of the Press?

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By Max Frost

On Friday, Chris Cillizza – a prominent media commentator formerly of the Washington Post and CNN – published a tweet: “The U.S. has hit its lowest mark in terms of press freedom ever. Our press freedom is now similar to Sierra Leone, Gambia and Uruguay…Not good.”

The post caught our attention because we recently reported from both Sierra Leone and Gambia, traveling across the countries and interviewing journalists and activists in both of them. 

Cillizza was responding to a new ranking by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a nonprofit that advocates for press freedom. When a journalist is jailed or killed, it’s often RSF who draws attention to the case. 

That work is noble. More controversially, RSF releases the “definitive” annual ranking of countries by press freedom, the latest version of which was released last week. 

The ranking classified just seven countries, all in northern Europe, as having “good” press freedom. It ranked the US 57th in the world and in the “problematic” category, alongside some democratic countries, like Italy and Japan, but also next to Ukraine and the war-torn Central African Republic.

RSF’s report on the US notes:

As an independent media outlet, we think they got a lot of this backward.

First, we’ll put a few points in the “shrinking press freedom” column: 

President Trump has filed massive lawsuits against ABC and CBS, accusing the former of wrongfully calling him a rapist and the latter of deceptively editing an interview with Kamala Harris. ABC settled for $16M while CBS is reportedly preparing a settlement, too. Elon Musk has said that the ABC reporters involved with the Harris story should be jailed. 

The White House has also banned the Associated Press from the press pool over the outlet’s refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico/America the Gulf of America. The AP has alleged that this constitutes unconstitutional “viewpoint discrimination.”

In theory, Trump’s rhetoric and actions risk scaring reporters into silence. If any smaller outlet were hit with such a lawsuit (Trump sued CBS for $20B), it could put them out of business. 

Yet there’s much more to this story. 

As an independent news startup, we are under no illusions: These same outlets that are now warning about threats to press freedom enabled a separate crackdown on the press, to which we were subject. 

The AP, CBS, and ABC consistently labeled the suggestion that Covid may have leaked from a lab as misinformation, and those who asked the question were deemed “conspiracy theorists” or “misinformation superspreaders.” 

This coverage contributed to a national narrative that the government and social media companies used to silence speech on social media. That, in turn, enabled the censorship of anyone deemed to insufficiently follow the pro-lockdown, anti-lab leak “consensus.”

Take a story like this one, from ABC in 2021: “Facebook 'failing' to tackle COVID-19 misinformation posted by prominent anti-vaccine group, study claims.” Meta would respond to public pressure by elevating “verified” news sources like ABC and tightening its algorithmic monitoring of “unverified” ones like Roca. These policies made life as an independent news startup extremely difficult while cementing the power of players like ABC and AP. 

Editor’s Note

A different kind of story for you all on this Monday morning, but as you can tell, reading that Cillizza tweet pissed us off. It takes a certain type of “privilege” for a journalist in the US to liken their situation to that of someone in a place like The Gambia. We’ve seen firsthand the difficulties those reporters face. We’d encourage Chris to take a trip to Serrekunda (photo below). 

If you’re interested in reading our latest reports, you can find them below.

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Thanks for reading — see you tomorrow.

—Max and Max